Hannah Arendt considered calling her magnum opus Amor Mundi: Love of the World. Instead, she settled upon The Human Condition. What is most difficult, Arendt writes, is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it. And yet she came to do just that. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection. Above all it means the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.

Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.

“In mid-December, a group of black students wrote a fourteen-page letter to the school’s board and president outlining fifty nonnegotiable demands for changes in Oberlin’s admissions and personnel policies, academic offerings, and the like. “You include Black and other students of color in the institution and mark them with the words ‘equity, inclusion and diversity,’ ” it said, “when in fact this institution functions on the premises of imperialism, white supremacy, capitalism, ableism, and a cissexist heteropatriarchy.”The letter was delivered by hand, but it leaked onto the Internet, and some of the more than seven hundred students who had signed it were hit with threats and hate speech online from anonymous accounts. The president, Marvin Krislov, rejected the letter’s stance, urging “collaboration.” All across Oberlin—a school whose norms may run a little to the left of Bernie Sanders—there was instead talk about “allyship”: a more contemporary answer to the challenges of pluralism. If you are a white male student, the thought goes, you cannot know what it means to be, say, a Latina; the social and the institutional worlds respond differently to her, and a hundred aggressions, large and small, are baked into the system. You can make yourself her ally, though—deferring to her experience, learning from her accounts, and supporting her struggles. You can reach for unity in difference.”

Heller spoke with Jasmine Adams, one of the signees of the fourteen-page letter. ““Me trying to appeal to people? Ain’t working. Me trying to be the quiet, sit-back-and-be-chill-and-do-my-work black person? Doesn’t work. Me trying to be friends with non-black folks? Doesn’t work.” She draws out her final syllables. “Whatever you do at Oberlin as a person of color or a low-income person, it just doesn’t work! So you’re just, like, I’ve got to stand up for myself.” “I have to be political,” Slay says. “I have to be political in whatever form or fashion,” Adams says. “Because I have nothing else to do.” There were negative responses to the fifty demands (which included a request for an $8.20-an-hour activism wage, the firing of nine Oberlin employees deemed insufficiently supportive of black students, and the tenuring of black faculty).”

That students are being political is something we should applaud. Hannah Arendt applauded students who engaged in politics. She supported students who requested leaves from classes to engage in political organizing. To make political claims. To seek to realize their interests. To live a political life. For Arendt, these are essential attributes of citizenship. Arendt even wrote that of all the students engaging in violence in the 1960s, she understood the violence of the black students the best because they were fighting for real political interests.

At the same time, Arendt insisted we separate politics from education. She saw education as at once conservative and revolutionary. Education is conservative insofar as it seeks to lead a student into the common world. The educator teaches students to love the world, the love of the world, Amor Mundi. We are, Arendt thinks, to love the world in full cognizance of its terrors and tribulations. And one important characteristic of the world that we love is that it is never static, never unquestionable, never sedentary. There is, she insists, always the possibility of a revolution, of a new direction, of an unexpected transformation. To love the world is to love it with both its horrors and its revolutionary potential. If liberals are too often overly critical and dismissive of the world we are living in, conservatives are frequently dismissive of revolutionary change. Education, for Arendt, is the teaching of the love of the world in both its conservative and revolutionary elements.

It matters, however, what one’s political argument is. Calling for people one disagrees with to be fired and seeking to shut down the exchange of opinions that is at the heart of both politics and academic life are demands that while political go against the very idea of both politics and education. So too are the efforts to stop the teaching of so-called offensive books. One student objected to the teaching of Sophocles’ Antigone, arguing in the campus newspaper the Oberlin Review that Antigone’s case for suicide was a potential trigger. According to Heller, the student “argued that trigger warnings were like ingredient lists on food: “People should have the right to know and consent to what they’re putting into their minds, just as they have the right to know and consent to what they’re putting into their bodies.”” The demand for trigger warnings emerges from the medicalization of campus discussion so that literature is no longer part of the humanities and opinions are extracted from their traditional political context; now all words and images are understood medically as potential triggers that may induce traumas. Traumas, of course, are real and can be debilitating. Once the language of trauma invades the academic and political spheres, however, reason and persuasion give way to preventative medicine.

What we are seeing emerge on college campuses is a hierarchy of oppressions in which each group insists that its sufferings need to be addressed and that it too must be protected from hostile and unwelcome speech. On February 25th, an Oberlin publication published an article that included screenshots from the Facebook feed of Joy Karega, an assistant professor of rhetoric and composition at Oberlin. The posts suggested, among other things, that Zionists had been involved in the 9/11 plot, that ISIS was a puppet of Mossad and the C.I.A., and that the Rothschild family owned “your news, the media, your oil, and your government.” The posts did not sit well with everyone at Oberlin, where, weeks earlier, a group of alumni and students had written the president with worries about anti-Semitism on campus; the board of trustees denounced Karega’s Facebook activities. As a teacher, however, she’d been beloved by many students and considered an important faculty advocate for the school’s black undergraduates. The need for allyship became acute. And so, with spring approaching, students and faculty at one of America’s most progressive colleges felt pressured to make an awkward judgment: whether to ally themselves with the black community or whether to ally themselves with the offended Jews.”

It is a sad day when a professor at an elite institution fans false, anti-Semitic, and hateful propaganda. Professors have a power to speak and be believed by students and spreading false facts corrupts the fundamental role of the professor as someone who leads students into the truth and beauty of the common world. But it is also sad the board of trustees felt the need to get involved. The answer to such claptrap is to respond clearly and strongly. Professors, students, and administrators should speak out, making clear that such statements are wrong and dangerous. There is no need to attack the professor personally. This is not a personal matter. It is a matter of the responsibility of a college to teach young people how to engage intellectually around controversial and difficult questions on which we may legitimately disagree. Yes the Professor was wrong. But we should attack her facts and her arguments.

If there is a ray of hope visible in the chaos at Oberlin, it is the advice that Michelle Obama gave to the Oberlin students at a speech there last year. AT the 2015 commencement address, the First Lady advised Oberlin students to “run toward the noise.” Oberlin’s President told Heller that many students actually are eager to talk these matters through themselves. “One of the things we’ve heard from students is that they want to talk about difficult issues among themselves—they would prefer not to have people who purport to speak for them.” That is the right approach. What Heller finds at Oberlin, however, is that students want to run away from the noise. “But at Oberlin a number of students seem to want to run away. More than a few have told me that they are leaving Oberlin, or about to leave Oberlin, or thinking about leaving Oberlin—and this at one of the country’s most resource-rich, student-focussed schools…. Many also speak of urges to leave due to a fraying in their mental health, a personal price paid for the systemic stresses of campus life.”

At Bard, the Hannah Arendt Center is working with students to create a “Dorm Room Conversation” series modeled after the national “Living Room Conversations” model, in which six students who disagree will sit down for difficult conversations on difficult issues that divide the campus. We also have inaugurated a “Tough Talk” lecture series designed to bring highly controversial speakers to campus, speakers who can and will challenge students in their basic presumptions. And we are dedicating our 2016 Fall Conference to the topic of “Real Talk: Difficult Questions About Race, Sex, and Religion on Campus.” There are real questions about inequalities of race, sex, and religion on campus, not to mention class and other inequalities that structure campus social and political life. It is worthwhile to talk about and struggle against such inequalities. But we must do so in a way that honors our common commitment to a shared political and intellectual world. The First Lady’s advice is sound: Run toward the noise.

“The Bush administration’s mass surveillance efforts were partly exposed in December 2005, when the New York Times published a front page article by reporters James Risen and Eric Lichtblau, which revealed that the NSA was monitoring international phone calls and emails of some people in the US without obtaining warrants. Eight years later, that story would be dwarfed by Snowden’s revelations. But at the time, the Bush White House was furious – and they were determined to find and punish whoever had leaked the details to the New York Times. According to Crane, his superiors inside the Pentagon’s Inspector General’s office were eager to help. Henry Shelley, the general counsel – the office’s top lawyer – urged that the IG office should tell the FBI agents investigating the Times leak about Drake and the other NSA whistleblowers. After all, the NSA whistleblowers’ recent complaint had objected to the same surveillance practices described in the Times article – which made them logical suspects in the leak. Crane objected strenuously. Informing anyone – much less FBI investigators – of a whistleblower’s name was illegal. After debating the matter at a formal meeting in the personal office of the inspector general, Shelley and Crane continued arguing in the hallway outside. “I reached into my breast pocket and pulled out my copy of the Whistleblower Protection Act,” Crane recalled. “I was concerned that Henry was violating the law. Our voices weren’t raised, but the conversation was, I would say, very intense and agitated. Henry [replied] that he was the general counsel, the general counsel was in charge of handling things with the Justice Department and he would do things his way.” There the disagreement between Crane and Shelley stalled. Or so it seemed until 18 months later. On the morning of 26 July, 2007, FBI agents with guns drawn stormed the houses of Binney, Wiebe, Loomis and Roark. Binney was toweling off after a shower when agents accosted him; he and his wife suddenly found themselves with guns aimed directly between their eyes, the retired NSA man recalled.”

Hannah Arendt considered calling her magnum opus Amor Mundi: Love of the World. Instead, she settled upon The Human Condition. What is most difficult, Arendt writes, is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it. And yet she came to do just that. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection. Above all it means the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.

Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.

In an essay in the Washington Post, Danielle Allen invokes Hannah Arendt to suggest that we must speak out about the danger Donald Trump poses to constitutional democracy. “Like any number of us raised in the late 20th century, I have spent my life perplexed about exactly how Hitler could have come to power in Germany. Watching Donald Trump’s rise, I now understand. Leave aside whether a direct comparison of Trump to Hitler is accurate. That is not my point. My point rather is about how a demagogic opportunist can exploit a divided country. To understand the rise of Hitler and the spread of Nazism, I have generally relied on the German-Jewish émigré philosopher Hannah Arendt and her arguments about the banality of evil. Somehow people can understand themselves as ‘just doing their job,’ yet act as cogs in the wheel of a murderous machine. Arendt also offered a second answer in a small but powerful book called ‘Men in Dark Times.’ In this book, she described all those who thought that Hitler’s rise was a terrible thing but chose ‘internal exile,’ or staying invisible and out of the way as their strategy for coping with the situation. They knew evil was evil, but they too facilitated it, by departing from the battlefield out of a sense of hopelessness.” Allen knows that Trump is not the same as Hitler. Hitler had written an ideological and racist book calling for the rise of an Aryan nation and the expulsion and murder of the Jews; Trump, on the other hand, is seemingly non-ideological. But Allen does rightly see that Trump is dangerous insofar as he seems to have no respect for limits to his power, whether those limits are civil or constitutional. “Donald Trump has no respect for the basic rights that are the foundation of constitutional democracy, nor for the requirements of decency necessary to sustain democratic citizenship. Nor can any democracy survive without an expectation that the people require reasonable arguments that bring the truth to light, and Trump has nothing but contempt for our intelligence.” As first Chris Christie and now Maine Governor Paul LePage endorse Trump, it is clear that Trump is breaking down the resistance of the Republican establishment. While evangelical leaders are on record saying they will not support Trump if he is the nominee, establishment Republicans seem prepared to accept Trump as their standard-bearer.

Allen’s essay was met with a barrage of ugliness on social media. In an update Allen published, she reproduces dozens of tweets she received. Everyone should read these tweets simply to recognize the racist and anti-Semitic boorishness pulsing within Donald Trumps supporters–if not Trump himself. One tweet from DMT Trump Wizard goes “You cannot stop Donald Trump. White people are going to stop hating themselves and there is nothing you can do to stop it.” Another from War & Peace (an insult to Tolstoy) reads: “Jewish ancestry? 40%? 50%?” Another says, “You would be working a McDonalds if it wasn’t for affirmative action. What exactly are you bringing to the country?” The same person then attaches an anti-Semitic cartoon and writes, “I smell a jew.” Someone named Paul Harris asks, “why do third world people come to European ancestry countries to paracite of us? Why has the third world never created anything.” An exceedingly angry racist named Theodore Bundy sends multiple tweets including: “imagine, no more affirmative action. How will you get a job? This PC shit has destroyed a once great nation.” One writes, “My jewdar just went beep. Does the affirmative action negress have a bit of jew inside. No breaks on Trump train. Soz.” Aristides writes, “I can’t wait to see the look on your primitive monkey faces when the GOD-EMPEROR takes his throne. Go back to Africa posthaste.” And adds: “Wow, you are one butt-ugly n—er. Your face makes me sick to my stomach. Please gas yourself.” Ok, these tweets go on and on. Many are worse and call for Allen’s death. You should read them also to remind yourselves that speaking publicly takes courage.

Is Donald Trump racist and anti-Semitic? One can’t blame Trump or anyone for the opinions of his supporters. But when so many Trump supporters are so vocally racist and anti-Semitic, Trump owes it to himself and to the American people to publicly reject those vile opinions. That is a what someone must do if he aspires to be the leader of a multi-ethic and pluralistic democratic country. Not only has Trump not done so, but he has fanned the flames. Twice now he has retweeted tweets from members of white-supremacist groups, one of whose Twitter handle is @WhiteGenocideTM and whose profile tagline reads, “Get the f— out of my country.” Trump’s attacks on President Obama, his birther comments, his questioning of Ted Cruz’s citizenship, and his demonizing of Mexicans and Muslims have contributed to an atmosphere of hate that enables such racial attacks.

None of this means Trump himself is racist. He certainly does not pedal a consistent ideological racism of supremacy as Adolf Hitler and the Nazis did. There is little to suggest that Trump would attack the laws guaranteeing equal voting rights or question the equal protection clause of the Constitution. Rather, Trump is responding at least in part to decades of repressed anger where many Americans have been told they can not speak their minds, express their feelings, or state their opinion. A dishonest and calculated political correctness has enabled Trump to appear as a liberator by unleashing a pent-up anger that is a result of a political culture that has prohibited people from saying what they believe. One real and meaningful attraction of Trump’s campaign is his refusal to self-censor and his embrace of an honest if also low-class and boorish racial anger. Trump as President would likely make the USA a less tolerant and more hateful and angry country. Such a cultural transformation very well could happen here, and it is, of course, dangerous.

But the real danger of a Trump presidency may lie elsewhere. After Trump’s victory in Nevada, he hammered home his main them: Grab as much as you can. “Now we’re going to get greedy for the United States we’re going to grab and grab and grab. We’re going to bring in so much money and so much everything. We’re going to make America great again, folks, I’m telling you folks we’re going to make America great again.” What Trump hates is politics, the collective striving after common ideals of democracy and justice. What he loves about America is simply its promise of abundance, not its tradition of self-government. Freedom for Trump is not the Arendtian freedom to act and speak in public in ways that matter; it is the freedom to get rich and plaster one’s name on buildings and reality television shows.

Alongside Trump’s contempt for politics is his dismissal of the rule of law. He threatens to ban Muslims, to bring back water boarding, and to kill family members of the Islamic State, which are all violations of either international or U.S. Law. Former CIA Director Michael Hayden said recently on “Real Time With Bill Maher” that the US military should and would refuse to carry out such illegal orders if Trump as Commander-in-Chief were to issue them. Trump’s contempt for the law and all political and civil limits is part and parcel of his disdain for politics and all limits on what works.

No doubt Trump’s pragmatic and greedy America is part of America. But it is not the whole or even the best of the American tradition, a tradition that has its roots in Alexander Hamilton’s expressed hope in the first of the Federalist Papers that the United States would stand not for economic liberty but for political freedom: “It has been frequently remarked that it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, to decide by their conduct and example, the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.” As corrupt as our political system is, the answer cannot be to simply demean and dismiss the nobility of our democratic and constitutional traditions. The danger Trump truly poses is that he seems to care only about the idea of America as a land of milk and honey and to have forgotten or simply dismissed the idea of America as a land of political liberty. And he seems ready, able, and willing to tear down our corrupt political structures with no plan or idea of how they would be rebuilt or re-imagined. Creative destruction is a classic axiom of capitalist innovation, but it rarely works so well in democratic politics. –RB

Mark Steyn comes as close to anyone in understanding both the appeal and the danger Trump represents. In a long and rambling account of his experience attending a Trump rally in Burlington, Vermont, Steyn writes: “And then the announcement: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, the next President of the United States, Donald J Trump…’ ~THE SHOW: He’s very good at this. Very good. On the same day as Trump’s speech, Peter Shumlin, the colorless dullard serving as Vermont’s governor, came to the State House in Montpelier to deliver his ‘State of the State’ address. He required two prompters so he could do the Obama swivel-head like a guy with good seats at Wimbledon following the world’s slowest centre-court rally. Two prompters! In the Vermont legislature! And for the same old generic boilerplate you forget as soon as you’ve heard it. Trump has no prompters. He walks out, pulls a couple of pieces of folded paper from his pocket, and then starts talking. Somewhere in there is the germ of a stump speech, but it would bore him to do the same poll-tested focus-grouped thing night after night, so he basically riffs on whatever’s on his mind. This can lead to some odd juxtapositions: One minute he’s talking about the Iran deal, the next he detours into how Macy’s stock is in the toilet since they dumped Trump ties. But in a strange way it all hangs together: It’s both a political speech, and a simultaneous running commentary on his own campaign. It’s also hilarious. I’ve seen no end of really mediocre shows at the Flynn in the last quarter-century, and I would have to account this the best night’s entertainment I’ve had there with the exception of the great jazz singer Dianne Reeves a few years back. He’s way funnier than half the stand-up acts I’ve seen at the Juste pour rires comedy festival a couple of hours north in Montreal. And I can guarantee that he was funnier than any of the guys trying their hand at Trump Improv night at the Vermont Comedy Club a couple of blocks away. He has a natural comic timing. Just to be non-partisan about this, the other day I was listening to Obama’s gun-control photo-op at the White House, and he thanked Gabby Giffords, by explaining that her husband Mark’s brother is an astronaut in outer space and he’d called just before Mark’s last meeting at the White House but, not wishing to disturb the President, Mark didn’t pick up. ‘Which made me feel kind of bad,’ said the President. ‘That’s a long-distance call.’ As I was driving along, I remember thinking how brilliantly Obama delivered that line. He’s not usually generous to others and he’s too thin-skinned to be self-deprecating with respect to himself, but, when he wants to get laughs, he knows how to do it. Trump’s is a different style: He’s looser, and more freewheeling. He’s not like Jeb – he doesn’t need writers, and scripted lines; he has a natural instinct for where the comedy lies. He has a zest for the comedy of life. To be sure, some of the gags can be a little – what’s the word? – mean-spirited. The performance was interrupted by knots of protesters. ‘Throw ’em out!’ barked Trump, after the first chants broke out. The second time it happened, he watched one of the security guys carefully picking up the heckler’s coat. ‘Confiscate their coats,’ deadpanned Trump. ‘It’s ten below zero outside.’ Third time it happened, he extended his coat riff: ‘We’ll mail them back to them in a couple of weeks.’ On MSNBC, they apparently had a discussion on how Trump could be so outrageous as to demand the confiscation of private property. But in showbusiness this is what is known as a ‘joke’. And in the theatre it lands: everyone’s laughing and having a ball. That’s the point. I think it would help if every member of the pundit class had to attend a Trump rally before cranking out the usual shtick about how he’s tapping into what Jeb called ‘angst and anger’. Yes, Trump supporters are indignant (and right to be) about the bipartisan cartel’s erasure of the southern border and their preference for unskilled Third World labor over their own citizenry, but ‘anger’ is not the defining quality of a Trump night out. The candidate is clearly having the time of his life, and that’s infectious, which is why his supporters are having a good time, too. Had Mitt campaigned like this, he’d be president. But he had no ability to connect with voters. Nor does Jeb (‘I’ve been endorsed by another 27 has-beens’) Bush.”

Matt Taibbi sees the appeal and the danger in Trump and worries he may well win. “In Manchester, a protester barely even manages to say a word before disappearing under a blanket of angry boos: ‘Trump! Trump! Trump!’ It’s a scene straight out of Freaks. In a Trump presidency, there will be free tar and feathers provided at the executive’s every public address. It’s a few minutes after that when a woman in the crowd shouts that Ted Cruz is a p-ssy. She will later tell a journalist she supports Trump because his balls are the size of ‘watermelons,’ while his opponents’ balls are more like ‘grapes’ or ‘raisins.’ Trump’s balls are unaware of this, but he instinctively likes her comment and decides to go into headline-making mode. ‘I never expect to hear that from you again!’ he says, grinning. ‘She said he’s a p-ssy. That’s terrible.” Then, theatrically, he turns his back to the crowd. As the 500 or so reporters in attendance scramble to instantly make this the most important piece of news in the world–in less than a year Trump has succeeded in turning the USA into a massive high school–the candidate beams. What’s he got to be insecure about? The American electoral system is opening before him like a flower. In person, you can’t miss it: The same way Sarah Palin can see Russia from her house, Donald on the stump can see his future. The pundits don’t want to admit it, but it’s sitting there in plain view, 12 moves ahead, like a chess game already won: President Donald Trump. A thousand ridiculous accidents needed to happen in the unlikeliest of sequences for it to be possible, but absent a dramatic turn of events–an early primary catastrophe, Mike Bloomberg ego-crashing the race, etc.–this boorish, monosyllabic TV tyrant with the attention span of an Xbox-playing 11-year-old really is set to lay waste to the most impenetrable oligarchy the Western world ever devised. It turns out we let our electoral process devolve into something so fake and dysfunctional that any half-bright con man with the stones to try it could walk right through the front door and tear it to shreds on the first go. And Trump is no half-bright con man, either. He’s way better than average. His pitch is: He’s rich, he won’t owe anyone anything upon election, and therefore he won’t do what both Democratic and Republican politicians unfailingly do upon taking office, i.e., approve rotten/regressive policies that screw ordinary people. He talks, for instance, about the anti-trust exemption enjoyed by insurance companies, an atrocity dating back more than half a century, to the McCarran-Ferguson Act of 1945. This law, sponsored by one of the most notorious legislators in our history (Nevada Sen. Pat McCarran was thought to be the inspiration for the corrupt Sen. Pat Geary in The Godfather II), allows insurance companies to share information and collude to divvy up markets. Trump may travel to campaign stops on his own plane, but his speeches are increasingly populist as he rails against money in politics, big pharma and insurance companies. Neither the Republicans nor the Democrats made a serious effort to overturn this indefensible loophole during the debate over the Affordable Care Act. Trump pounds home this theme in his speeches, explaining things from his perspective as an employer. ‘The insurance companies,’ he says, ‘they’d rather have monopolies in each state than hundreds of companies going all over the place bidding … It’s so hard for me to make deals … because I can’t get bids.’ He goes on to explain that prices would go down if the state-by-state insurance fiefdoms were eliminated, but that’s impossible because of the influence of the industry. ‘I’m the only one that’s self-funding … Everyone else is taking money from, I call them the bloodsuckers.’ Trump isn’t lying about any of this.”

Adam Gopnik mourns the crescent croissant: “Why is a croissant shaped that way, anyway? The first truth is that they are not, necessarily. As veteran visitors to Parisian bakeries know, the superior, all-butter croissants are already commonly articulated as straight pastries–or, at least, as gently sloping ones–while the inferior oil or margarine ones must, by law, be neatly turned in. This sometimes leads those who expect clarity and logic, rather than complexity and self-cancelling entrapment, from French laws to think that the straight croissants are all butter and the curved ones are reliably not. The truth is that a butter croissant can be any shape it chooses, on the general atavistic aristocratic principle that, butter being better, it creates its own realm of privilege. One only wishes that Umberto Eco, whom we sadly lost last week, was still around to parse this issue, because Eco, long before he was king of the airport bookstore, was an emperor of signs, one of the world’s leading linguists and semioticians. The underlying logic for the croissant being a crescent, one suspects he would have said, is ‘Saussurean,’ after the great early-twentieth-century linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, who glimpsed the truth that linguistic signs are arbitrary and find their meaning only by being clearly distinguished from other opposing signs. We know ‘Monday’ only because it doesn’t sound or look like ‘Sunday.’ P. G. Wodehouse, not surprisingly, showed his grasp of this rule when he had one of the Drones, on holiday in France, point out that he had been given a Continental breakfast consisting of ‘a roll shaped like a crescent and a roll shaped like a roll.’ Without the standard accompanying brioche, there would be no need for the curve; a roll-shaped roll produces a curved one, as ‘Sunday’ makes ‘Monday.’ The croissant, in this view, is curved in order to make plain what it isn’t as much as what it is. Murkier depths of meaning surely reside here, too, which would have taken Eco’s eye to plumb. Doubtless some social historian, a century or so hence, will get a thesis out of examining how, on the very verge of the threatened ‘Brexit’–the exit of England, at least, from the European Community–the mass marketers of Britain ostentatiously rejected a form seen as so clearly French that it is a regular part of that ominously named ‘Continental’ breakfast. Adding an arbitrary national shape to an established one to attempt an entirely English croissant, that future scholar will argue, is an affirmation of refusing to be one with Europe. (The crescent, moreover, is the sign of the Islamic empire, and some damp, suspicious kinds will see meaning in that, too.)”

Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen reads the contemporary literature on habituation–that is, self-help achieved by the ritualisation of certain kinds of virtuous praxis. The topic goes back to Aristotle, and perhaps even farther, but Ratner-Rosenhagen thinks it’s missing something these days: “Much of today’s habits literature has a contemporary feeling, with its focus on time management, individual productivity, and business success, but the genre has a long history. For millennia, there has been a tradition of august thinkers writing about how healthy habits promote–and unhealthy habits undermine–self-fashioning and moral improvement. The ancient Stoics, for example, sought to understand how perfecting one’s reason by making it a habit could be the path to virtue. The Enlightenment psychologist Maine de Biran had a harder time squaring rigorous intellect and habitual practices, contending that ‘all that happens exclusively under the sway of habit should lose its authority before the eyes of reason’. Friedrich Nietzsche, too, was fascinated with habits. He had his own übermenschliche work habits, while at the same time he felt grateful to every bit of ‘misery and… sickness’ that came his way because they gave him ‘a hundred backdoors through which I can escape from enduring habits’. Gertrude Stein couldn’t have disagreed more. For Stein, the habits of ‘daily island life’–those simple, unglamorous rituals of cleaning, eating, sleeping–were the means by which people who had lived through the savagery and chaos of two world wars could orient themselves with the simple and commonplace. As ever, the habits literature of today promises order in a disordered world, but it also comes with a subtle and significant difference. The most important difference is not the forgotten art of style, though the staccato prose, exclamation points, bland generalisations, and clichéd motivational quotations of today’s literature neither stimulate the imagination nor activate the will. Rather, it is the lost promise of habits literature as a form of ethical inquiry and social commentary. Individual improvement has always been the purpose of habits literature, but the genre used to require appraising the society in which the self, and the habits, formed. Historically, thinking about habits without social contexts or ethical consequences was unthinkable. Today it is axiomatic.”

Charles Duhigg writes about Google’s Project Aristotle seeking to understand why some corporate teams work better than others. The answer, it seems, has less to do with intelligence, leadership, or structure and more to do with psychological safety, or what Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson defines as a ‘”shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking.'” Psychological safety in the new corporate lingo “‘…describes a team climate characterized by interpersonal trust and mutual respect in which people are comfortable being themselves.’ When Rozovsky and her Google colleagues encountered the concept of psychological safety in academic papers, it was as if everything suddenly fell into place. One engineer, for instance, had told researchers that his team leader was ‘direct and straightforward, which creates a safe space for you to take risks.’ That team, researchers estimated, was among Google’s accomplished groups. By contrast, another engineer had told the researchers that his ‘team leader has poor emotional control.’ He added: ‘He panics over small issues and keeps trying to grab control. I would hate to be driving with him being in the passenger seat, because he would keep trying to grab the steering wheel and crash the car.’ That team, researchers presumed, did not perform well. Most of all, employees had talked about how various teams felt. ‘And that made a lot of sense to me, maybe because of my experiences at Yale,’ Rozovsky said. ‘I’d been on some teams that left me feeling totally exhausted and others where I got so much energy from the group.’ Rozovsky’s study group at Yale was draining because the norms–the fights over leadership, the tendency to critique–put her on guard. Whereas the norms of her case-competition team–enthusiasm for one another’s ideas, joking around and having fun–allowed everyone to feel relaxed and energized. For Project Aristotle, research on psychological safety pointed to particular norms that are vital to success. There were other behaviors that seemed important as well–like making sure teams had clear goals and creating a culture of dependability. But Google’s data indicated that psychological safety, more than anything else, was critical to making a team work. ‘We had to get people to establish psychologically safe environments,’ Rozovsky told me. But it wasn’t clear how to do that. ‘People here are really busy,’ she said. ‘We needed clear guidelines.'” Duhigg writes that the rise of group work in Silicon Valley is driven by research showing that profitability and worker satisfaction increase when workers collaborate. What is unremarked is the confluence between the demand for safe spaces in universities and in corporations, which offers a whole new take on the corporatization of the university. –RB

Williams College has a student organization that sponsors an “Uncomfortable Learning” lecture series that brings speakers to campus whose views are out of step with the majority opinion on campus. The group made news back in October when it first invited and then–in response to campus opposition–disinvited Suzanne Venker–a conservative woman and author of The War Against Men. Now Robby Soave reports that the group has made news again after a speaker it invited was prohibited from giving his speech by Williams’ President Adam Falk. In a statement to campus, Falk writes: “‘Today I am taking the extraordinary step of canceling a speech by John Derbyshire, who was to have presented his views here on Monday night. The college didn’t invite Derbyshire, but I have made it clear to the students who did that the college will not provide a platform for him. Free speech is a value I hold in extremely high regard. The college has a very long history of encouraging the expression of a range of viewpoints and giving voice to widely differing opinions. We have said we wouldn’t cancel speakers or prevent the expression of views except in the most extreme circumstances. In other words: There’s a line somewhere, but in our history of hosting events and speeches of all kinds, we hadn’t yet found it. We’ve found the line. Derbyshire, in my opinion, is on the other side of it. Many of his expressions clearly constitute hate speech, and we will not promote such speech on this campus or in our community. We respect–and expect–our students’ exploration of ideas, including ones that are very challenging, and we encourage individual choice and decision-making by students. But at times it’s our role as educators and administrators to step in and make decisions that are in the best interest of students and our community. This is one of those times.'” Zach Wood, a Williams student who helps run the “Uncomfortable Learning” series, explained his disagreement with Falk: “‘I think that President Falk is an analytic and deliberative leader and I respect his decision; however, I sharply disagree with his decision and if I could challenge it, I certainly would. I think his decision to cancel the speaker not only does a disservice to the intellectual character of our institution, but is antithetical to the principles of free speech and intellectual freedom that he has previously claimed to endorse. This decision is evidence of the fact that President Falk has failed to show support for student efforts to instill and promote political tolerance at Williams. I radically disagree with John Derybshire. And he has said offensive, even hateful things about minorities, things that I have a problem with. That is precisely why I was looking forward to taking him to task. If every student does not desire that kind of intellectual challenge, that is perfectly okay. But for President Falk to deny Williams students that opportunity, I believe, is not merely injudicious, but undemocratic and irresponsible.'” As I write this, I am in Saratoga Springs at a two-day retreat on how to talk about difficult questions like race and sex on campus. The conversations here are inspiring. Students come from communities all over the world with meaningfully different values and traditions, and they arrive on campus and have to figure out how to live with and talk to people whose worldviews challenge them. The students I speak with are genuinely curious and want to hear what others have to say. In most cases, then, there is a false debate between hate speech and free speech. It is not the students at Yale or the students at Williams who shut down speech. When free speech is sacrificed, it is not done by students. Rather it is cowardly administrators who fear criticism and don’t trust their students. –RB

Cypress Marrs takes a second to think about what Apple’s devices are: “This campaign, like so much of Apple’s marketing, attempts to render potential anxieties about new computing devices irrelevant. The customer has questions, gut level concerns–how will this device impact their privacy? Their political life? How they interact with other people? How they experience their life? Apple responds to these reservations with a nod and a wink. Its marketing campaigns show individuals using Apple’s technologies toward ends that stand in contrast to the reality that consumers fear the devices will bring into being. The devices are not marketed through a catalogue of their functions but rather by conflating their functions with what they may facilitate. To do this, Apple employs our shared symbolic language… As imprecise use of these symbols spreads, it becomes increasingly difficult for individuals to think acutely about the world around them. Likewise, Apple ads are attempts to radically reshape the ways–the symbolic tools–which individuals use to comprehend the world. As personal computing devices become increasingly intimate–as they move from the desk to the book bag, from the pants pocket to the wrist–the symbolic fun-house of Apple’s marketing continues to conflate what a device does with what it might do–the device becomes the time taken for a kiss, the appreciation of the skyline, and the revolutionary impulse in an authoritarian state. Such conflations in conjunction with the constant and intimate presence of telecommunication has shrunk the distance between the personal and the public–between an experience and the image of that experience. Taken together, all of this makes it difficult to conceive of ourselves–or even conceive of conceiving of ourselves–in relation to a large and symbolically complex whole.”

Stephen J. Rose defends residential colleges against the threat of MOOCs and online education. But in so doing, Rose makes an argument for what colleges do best that is hardly inspiring and that certainly abandons any notion that college education is about learning to think with and against a tradition of intellectual, scientific, artistic, and humanist inquiry. “Higher education essentially has two functions: First, for those who reside on or near campus, it provides a period of semi-independence and autonomy in a protected environment with many social interactions; and second, it develops the workplace skills of general cognition, ability to learn, task completion, group and organizational skills, and, for many students, a field-specific knowledge base. While Carey does show the limitations of the current system, he falls very short in showing how a MOOC-based system can be scaled up and produce better results in preparing young people to enter and succeed in the labor force…. [I]n virtually all modern, industrialized societies, higher education has become the main path for preparing workers for the new service economy based in offices, health care, and education. The costs of such education in dollars and time are indeed immense–but there is a large payoff for the economy as a whole.”

In her critique of the Rights of Man, Hannah Arendt analyzed the problem of the “abstract” human being who was nowhere to be found. If Arendt’s political analyses stemmed from her grappling with the Jewish Question and the problems of minorities or stateless people, this talk takes a different turn. Rather than considering the outcomes of the Rights of Man for subaltern groups or refugees, this talk follows the transformation of the Jewish Question when Jews themselves are no longer a minority, but sovereign citizens in their own ethno-national state. It considers some of the many ways in which Israeli Jews struggle to be Jewish-from conversion and keeping kosher to the everyday surveillance of goats-suggesting that popular sovereignty might not be liberating in the ways we imagine.

BIO: Joyce Dalsheim is currently Assistant Professor in the Department of Global, International and Area Studies at UNC-Charlotte. She is a cultural anthropologist who studies nationalism, religion and the secular, and conflict in Israel/Palestine. She earned her her doctorate from the New School for Social Research, and has taught at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Ben Gurion University of the Negev, and Wake Forest University.

Toni Morrison described Primo Levi’s writing as a “triumph of human identity and worth over the pathology of human destruction.” Levi is the distinguished author of decisive books such as If This Is a Man, and The Periodic Table. For the first time the entire oeuvre of the most acclaimed Holocaust survivor is available in English, after a 7-years collective endeavor lead by Ann Goldstein, New Yorker editor and celebrated translator of Elena Ferrante and Jhumpa Lahiri. Together with Goldstein, the event will feature Michael F. Moore, a most accomplished translator from Italian and UN interpreter.

For more info on Goldstein and the Complete Works of Primo Levi, view interview: HERE.

Primo Levi, (born July 31, 1919, Turin, Italy-died April 11, 1987, Turin), Italian-Jewish writer and chemist, noted for his restrained and moving autobiographical account of and reflections on survival in the Nazi concentration camps.

The Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College announces two post-doctoral fellowships for the 2016-2017 academic year. The fellows should have a Ph.D. in political theory, philosophy, or a related field in the humanities, and his or her work should intersect meaningfully with Hannah Arendt’s thinking. In residence at the Arendt Center, the fellow will pursue his or her independent research at the Center, which includes Hannah Arendt’s personal library. The fellow will have access to Arendt’s Digital Archive through a relationship with the Arendt Center in New York City. In addition, the fellow will have the opportunity to participate in seminars, conferences, lectures, colloquia, and workshops organized by the Center.

To apply for the fellowship, please apply through Interfolio.com at: http://apply.interfolio.com/33792 with a letter of application explaining your research project and interest in the Center and a description of your teaching experience, CV, and two letters of reference.

“Learning From the West African Ebola Epidemic” is a one-day conference in New York City exploring the hypothesis that building public trust in effective organizations is essential for fighting health crises such as Ebola. The conference is grounded in the Global Health Security Agenda that seeks to accelerate progress towards a world safe from infectious disease.

About the Film: A brand new documentary about one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century. The German-Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt caused an uproar in the 1960s by coining the subversive concept of the “Banality of Evil” when referring to the trial of Adolph Eichmann, which she covered for the New Yorker magazine. Her private life was no less controversial thanks to her early love affair with the renowned German philosopher and Nazi supporter Martin Heidegger. This thought provoking and spirited documentary, with its abundance of archival materials, offers an intimate portrait of the whole of Arendt’s life, traveling to places where she lived, worked, loved, and was betrayed, as she wrote about the open wounds of modern times. Through her books, which are still widely read and the recent release of Margarethe von Trotta’s biopic Hannah Arendt (also a Zeitgeist Films release) there is renewed interest in Arendt throughout the world, especially among young people who find her insights into the nature of evil, totalitarianism, ideologies, and the perils faced by refugees, more relevant than ever. Watch the Trailer.

Wednesday, April 6, 2016

Film Forum, 209 West Houston Street West of 6th Ave., New York, NY, Time TBA

This week on the blog, Dawn Herrera Helphand discusses why Bernie Sanders’ appeal illustrates how widespread the political sentiments that Hannah Arendt identified as the causes of revolution are in both parties in the Quote of the Week. Marshall McLuhan comments on the power of critical thinking against automatic movement in this week’s Thoughts on Thinking. We are pleased to announce the first issue of AJPA News, the official newsletter of the American Jewish Peace Archive (AJPA). Finally, we appreciate the annotations Hannah Arendt made to her copy of Montesquieu’s “The Spirit of Laws” in this week’s Library feature.

“It is critical vision alone which can mitigate the unimpeded operation of the automatic.”

— Marshall McLuhan

Marshall McLuhan’s Biography

Marshall McLuhan, in full Herbert Marshall McLuhan (born July 21, 1911, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada—died Dec. 31, 1980, Toronto), Canadian communications theorist and educator, whose aphorism “the medium is the message” summarized his view of the potent influence of television, computers, and other electronic disseminators of information in shaping styles of thinking and thought, whether in sociology, art, science, or religion. He regarded the printed book as an institution fated to disappear.

McLuhan was associated with the University of Toronto from 1946 until 1979. He became full professor of English literature there in 1952 and was made director of the university’s Centre for Culture and Technology in 1963. He was also a popular lecturer.

In 1962 McLuhan published The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, the first of several books in which he examined communications and society. His other works include The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man (1951), Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964), The Medium Is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects (with Quentin Fiore; 1967), From Cliché to Archetype (with Wilfred Watson; 1970), and City as Classroom (with Kathryn Hutchon and Eric McLuhan; 1977). McLuhan’s critical view of 20th-century society’s self-transformation made him one of the popular prophetic voices of his time.

Hannah Arendt considered calling her magnum opus Amor Mundi: Love of the World. Instead, she settled upon The Human Condition. What is most difficult, Arendt writes, is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it. And yet she came to do just that. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection. Above all it means the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.

Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.

Jill Lepore wonders if we’re at the start of something new: “There will not be a revolution, but this election might mark the beginning of the seventh party system. The Internet, like all new communications technologies, has contributed to a period of political disequilibrium, one in which, as always, party followers have been revolting against party leaders. So far, neither the R.N.C. nor the D.N.C., nor any of their favored candidates, has been able to grab the wheel. Trump, meanwhile, is barrelling down the highway toward the White House, ignoring every road sign, a man without a party. The fate of the free world does not hinge on this election. But the direction of the party system might. And that’s probably worth thinking about, slowly and deeply. Parties, while not written into the U.S. Constitution, do sustain our system of government. As the political scientist V. O. Key pointed out, half a century ago, ‘They perform an essential function in the management of succession to power, as well as in the process of obtaining popular consent to the course of public policy. They amass sufficient support to buttress the authority of governments; or, on the contrary, they attract or organize discontent and dissatisfaction sufficient to oust the government. In either case, they perform the function of the articulation of the interests and aspirations of a substantial segment of the citizenry, usually in ways contended to be promotive of the national weal.’ The American party system is not only a creation of the press; it is dependent on it. It is currently fashionable, indispensable, even, to malign the press, whether liberal or conservative. ‘That’s the media game,’ Sanders said, dismissing a question that Cooper had asked him during CNN’s town hall. ‘That’s what the media talks about. Who cares?’ But when the press is in the throes of change, so is the party system. And the national weal had better watch out. It’s unlikely, but not impossible, that the accelerating and atomizing forces of this latest communications revolution will bring about the end of the party system and the beginning of a new and wobblier political institution. With our phones in our hands and our eyes on our phones, each of us is a reporter, each a photographer, unedited and ill judged, chatting, snapping, tweeting, and posting, yikking and yakking. At some point, does each of us become a party of one?”

Parties are coalitions, and they in some way connect voters based on common interests. The breakdown of parties reflects the retreat of interest as a prime motivation for voting. Candidates are selected for being likable, honest, and fresh. The breakdown of interests and classes is accompanied by the rise of mass politics, one that appeals to coherent fantasies rather than complicated realities. For Hannah Arendt, “The breakdown of the class system meant automatically the breakdown of the party system, chiefly because these parties, being interest parties, could no longer represent class interests…. The fall of protecting class walls transformed the slumbering majorities behind all parties into one great unorganized structureless mass of furious individuals who had nothing in common except their vague apprehension that the hopes of party members were doomed, that, consequently, the most respected, articulate and representative members of the community were fools and that all the power that be were not so much evil as they equally stupid and fraudulent.” The hatred of the establishment today and the anger of individuals is connected, as Lepore argues, to the rise of social media–it is no accident that the two leading beneficiaries of popular anger are both running campaigns focused around social media. The point that Arendt makes and Lepore here affirms is that mass movements, separate from interest, rises alongside a “highly differentiated individualism and sophistication” that brings about “social atomization and extreme individualization.” Arendt’s point is that “the masses grew out of the fragments of a highly atomized society whose competitive structure and concomitant loneliness of the individual had been held in check only through membership in a class.” The atomizing impact of social media along with the breakdown of interest-based parties does, as Lepore writes, threaten a meaningful change in the American political landscape. –RB

Jacob Weisberg considers our fate as “device people.” In 2015, “Americans spend an average of five and a half hours a day with digital media, more than half of that time on mobile devices, according to the research firm eMarketer.” Amazingly, “we check our phones 221 times a day–an average of every 4.3 minutes–according to a UK study.” But what does our device dependence mean? “It is the troubling aspects of social and mobile media that Sherry Turkle attends to in her wise and observant new book, Reclaiming Conversation. A clinical psychologist and sociologist who teaches at MIT, Turkle is by no means antitechnology. But after a career examining relations between people and computers, she blends her description with advocacy. She presents a powerful case that a new communication revolution is degrading the quality of human relationships–with family and friends, as well as colleagues and romantic partners. The picture she paints is both familiar and heartbreaking: parents who are constantly distracted on the playground and at the dinner table; children who are frustrated that they can’t get their parents’ undivided attention; gatherings where friends who are present vie for attention with virtual friends; classrooms where professors gaze out at a sea of semiengaged multitaskers; and a dating culture in which infinite choice undermines the ability to make emotional commitments. Turkle finds the roots of the problem in the failure of young people absorbed in their devices to develop fully independent selves, a topic she began to explore in Alone Together (2011). In that book, she examined the way interaction with robotic toys and ‘always on’ connections affect adolescent development. She argued that phones and texting disrupt the ability to separate from one’s parents, and raise other obstacles to adulthood. Curating a Facebook profile alters the presentation of self. Absorption in a gaming avatar can become a flight from the difficulties of real life. Young people face new anxieties around the loss of privacy and the persistence of online data. In her new book, she expresses a version of those concerns that is as much philosophic as psychiatric. Because they aren’t learning how to be alone, she contends, young people are losing their ability to empathize. ‘It’s the capacity for solitude that allows you to reach out to others and see them as separate and independent,’ Turkle writes. Without an ability to look inward, those locked into the virtual worlds of social media develop a sensibility of ‘I share, therefore I am,’ crafting their identities for others. Continuous digital performance leaves teenagers experiencing what ought to be the satisfactions of solitude only as ‘disconnection anxiety.'”

Hal Herring offers one of the few really meaningful accounts of the recently ended occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon. “What more can be said? I was one of the hundreds of journalists who went to the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge during the Ammon Bundy occupation, and I saw the same things that all the rest of them did. If there was any difference between myself and those hundreds of other journalists, maybe it was that I went there looking for kindred spirits. I am a self-employed, American-born writer with a wife and two teenage children living in a tiny town on the plains of Montana. I’m a reader of the U.S. Constitution, one who truly believes that the Second Amendment guarantees the survival of the rest of the Bill of Rights. I came of age reading Edward Abbey’s The Brave Cowboy, Orwell’s 1984, and a laundry-list of anarchists, from Tolstoy and Kropotkin to Bakunin and Proudhon, who gave me the maxim that defined my early twenties: ‘Whoever lays his hand on me to govern me is a usurper and a tyrant: I declare him my enemy.’ I read Malthus and Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau, and am a skeptic of government power. I was not surprised when I read about the outrage over the sentencing of Oregon ranchers Dwight and Steve Hammond for arson: Federal mandatory minimum sentencing has been a terrible idea since its inception. I am gobsmacked by an economy that seems engineered to impoverish anyone who dares try make their own living, and by a government that seems more and more distant from the people it represents, except when calling up our sons and daughters to attack chaotic peoples that clearly have nothing to do with me or anybody I know. I am isolated by a culture that is as inscrutable to me as any in the mountains of Afghanistan. For loving wilderness and empty lands and birdsong rather than teeming cities, I risk being called a xenophobe, a noxious nativist. For viewing guns as constitutionally protected, essential tools of self-defense and, if need be, liberation, I’m told that I defend the massacres of innocents in mass shootings. When I came to Montana at age twenty-five, I found in this vast landscape, especially in the public lands where I hunted and camped and worked, the freedom that was evaporating in the South, where I grew up. I got happily lost in the space and the history. For a nature-obsessed, gun-soaked malcontent like me, it was home, and when Ammon Bundy and his men took over the Malheur refuge, on a cold night in January, I thought I should go visit my neighbors.” What Herring found at Malheur was not what he expected. “I went to the Malheur looking for kindred spirits. I found the mad, the fervent, the passionately misguided. I found the unknowing pawns of an existential chess game, in which we are, all of us, now caught. Driving home across the snow-packed Malheur Basin, through mile after mile of sage, with towering basalt cliffs in the near distance, herds of mule deer appearing as gray specks in the tongues of slide rock and wind-exposed yellow grass, I did not wonder what Edward Abbey would have said about all of this, or Kropotkin or the lugubrious monarchist Thomas Hobbes. I thought instead of the old C.S. Lewis books of my childhood, and of Lewis’ writings on the nature of evil, where evil is never a lie, because lying implies creation, and evil, by its nature, has no creative power. Instead, the nature of evil is to take a truth and twist it, sometimes as much as 180 degrees. Love of country becomes hatred of those we believe don’t share our devotion, or don’t share it the same way. The natural right of armed self-defense becomes the means to take over a wildlife refuge, to exert tyranny on those who work there, or those who love the place for the nature it preserves in a world replete with man’s endeavors. The U.S. Constitution, one of the most liberal and empowering documents ever composed, becomes, with just a slight annotation or interpretation, the tool of our own enslavement.” h/t Tom Keenan.

The Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College is looking for a leadership-oriented and dependable Part-Time Media Coordinator (20 to 25 Hours/Week) who can lead the expansion of the Center’s public impact and media presence, both online and in print. While no deep knowledge of Hannah Arendt is required, we seek someone passionate about the power of ideas to provoke thinking and elevate our public discourse. This job may be done remotely, but the Media Coordinator will need to be on campus at Bard College to assist with major events 2-3 times per year. To apply ASAP for this position, please click here.

Isabel Wilkerson argues that we are experiencing a second nadir in race relations in this country, one that is premised on racial hierarchies enforced by “law and custom.” “It has been a century since the Great Migration that produced both [Emmett Till and Tamir Rice] began. Our current era seems oddly aligned with that moment. The brutal decades preceding the Great Migration–when a black person was lynched on average every four days–were given a name by the historian Rayford Logan. He called them the Nadir. Today, in the era of the Charleston massacre, when, according to one analysis of F.B.I. statistics, an African-American is killed by a white police officer roughly every three and a half days, has the makings of a second Nadir. Or perhaps, in the words of Eric Foner, the leading scholar of Reconstruction, a ‘second Redemption.’ That is what historians call the period of backlash against the gains made by newly freedmen that led to Jim Crow. Today, with black advancement by an elite few extending as far as the White House, we are seeing ‘a similar kind of retreat,’ Professor Foner said. ‘The attack on voting rights, incarceration, obviously but even more intellectually and culturally, a sort of exhaustion with black protest, an attitude of “What are these people really complaining about? Look at what we’ve done for you.”‘ The country seems caught in a cycle. We leap forward only to slip back. ‘We have not made anywhere near the progress we think we have,’ said Bryan Stevenson of the Equal Justice Initiative in Alabama. ‘It’s as if we’re at halftime, and we started cheering as if we won the game.’ What befell Emmett and Tamir reflects how racial interactions have mutated over time, from the overt hatreds now shunned by most Americans to the unspoken, unconscious biases that are no less lethal and may be harder to fight. For all of its changes, the country remains in a similar place, a caste system based on what people look like. The men and women of the Great Migration were asking questions that remain unanswered today: What is to be the role of the people whom the country has marginalized by law and custom and with state-sanctioned violence for most of their time on this soil? How might these now 45 million people, still the most segregated of all groups in America, partake of the full fruits of citizenship? How can deeply embedded racial hierarchies be overcome?”

Kate Bowler, a scholar of American evangelism sick with late-stage cancer, writes about how the strain of American Christianity known as the prosperity gospel deals with illness like hers: “The prosperity gospel tries to solve the riddle of human suffering. It is an explanation for the problem of evil. It provides an answer to the question: Why me? For years I sat with prosperity churchgoers and asked them about how they drew conclusions about the good and the bad in their lives. Does God want you to get that promotion? Tell me what it’s like to believe in healing from that hospital bed. What do you hear God saying when it all falls apart? The prosperity gospel popularized a Christian explanation for why some people make it and some do not. They revolutionized prayer as an instrument for getting God always to say ‘yes.’ It offers people a guarantee: Follow these rules, and God will reward you, heal you, restore you. It’s also distressingly similar to the popular cartoon emojis for the iPhone, the ones that show you images of yourself in various poses. One of the standard cartoons shows me holding a #blessed sign. My world is conspiring to make me believe that I am special, that I am the exception whose character will save me from the grisly predictions and the CT scans in my inbox. I am blessed. The prosperity gospel holds to this illusion of control until the very end. If a believer gets sick and dies, shame compounds the grief. Those who are loved and lost are just that–those who have lost the test of faith. In my work, I have heard countless stories of refusing to acknowledge that the end had finally come. An emaciated man was pushed about a megachurch in a wheelchair as churchgoers declared that he was already healed. A woman danced around her sister’s deathbed shouting to horrified family members that the body can yet live. There is no graceful death, no ars moriendi, in the prosperity gospel. There are only jarring disappointments after fevered attempts to deny its inevitability. The prosperity gospel has taken a religion based on the contemplation of a dying man and stripped it of its call to surrender all. Perhaps worse, it has replaced Christian faith with the most painful forms of certainty. The movement has perfected a rarefied form of America’s addiction to self-rule, which denies much of our humanity: our fragile bodies, our finitude, our need to stare down our deaths (at least once in a while) and be filled with dread and wonder. At some point, we must say to ourselves, I’m going to need to let go.”

Kaya Genç walks with Istanbul’s street vendors: “Take a walk in Istanbul this winter and you will likely come across a kestaneci (chestnut seller), a pilavcı (chickpea rice man), or a macuncu (candyman) on one of its labyrinthine streets. Kestaneci sells chestnuts from his fancy little cart where he has a small oven, scales and a collection of paper bags to prepare your order. Kestaneci carts, most of them crimson-colored, are located on Istanbul’s Istiklal Avenue. There is one near Taksim Square and if you come to the city by boat you will certainly find one by the pier. Kestaneci provides the finest cure for a depressing day: you hand him five liras (around two dollars) and he hands you 50 grams of chestnuts, carefully measured in those miniature scales, before wishing you a very good afternoon. Whilst living in Amsterdam I used to love visiting the free market on the city’s streets during Queen’s Day (now known as King’s Day) where locals sold their crafts and bric-a-brac for bargain prices. Dutch authorities allowed the free market to take place one day every year. Here, street selling is a year long occupation; every day is for the Istanbul Street Vendor. In this city, vendors illuminate your way during nocturnal walks. Not long ago, after a heavy night of drinking, I came across a pilavcı in Karaköy. He seemed to have been placed there for the sole purpose of helping me to sober up a bit. Vendors often make you feel this way: their sudden appearances on street corners are quite miraculous, almost angel-ish. Pilavcı‘s cart had large wheels and an umbrella affixed to its top. The main part of the cart consisted of a huge metal plate covered on four sides with thick glass. The inside was illuminated so I got a nice view of the warm rice that awaited me, which, on that and other winter nights, was a particularly mouthwatering sight. This pilavcı had placed a selection of drinks on top of this. With his long white mustache and benevolent face, he calmly filled a plastic case with spoonfuls of newly cooked rice, rich with chickpea and pepper. It was delicious. Exhausted after a long day I gratefully sat down on one of his wooden stools and, while filling my plastic spoon, chatted with the elderly man. Where did he get his rice, I asked him. How long had he been doing this job? Did he earn well? He was used to questions like mine, which he answered quickly before complaining about the lack of interest to his food, the rise of unemployment in the country, and his problems with paying his electricity bills. The pilavcı wore a white apron that night, which gave him the air of a surgeon; hipsters in Karaköy mostly ignore his offerings, preferring to eat overpriced pizza and sushi in places that make them feel like they are having lunch in Paris or Tokyo. They should know better.”

In a profile of celebrity chef Heston Blumenthal, Maria Konnikova argues that molecular gastronomy is the art of putting biology back into eating: “What we eat and why we eat it is as much a psychological phenomenon as a physical one. Throughout most of history, eating has been understood as a primitive human characteristic, an evolutionary necessity, the stuff of base survival instinct. This perception turns out to be far too simplistic. The more we learn about flavor, the more we realize just how easy it is to manipulate. Not just by the overclocked sensations of processed food, but in ways that makes healthier choices seem at once tastier and more satisfying. Though most of us would like to think we have discerning palates, our taste is quite easy to fool. When we try to imagine the flavor of something, we tend to focus on our mouth–the experience of placing, say, a ripe strawberry on our tongue. But that, in fact, is taste, and though we tend to conflate it with flavor, a vast chasm exists between the two. Taste is an experience composed of only five elements: sweet, salty, bitter, sour, and umami. Thousands of receptors on our tongue are designed to identify and respond to these elements, each one specializing in one of the five qualities. Without input from other senses–most notably our nose, but also our eyes, ears, and even hands–taste is merely a flat, single-note sensation with none of the nuance or enjoyment we associate with food in general and with specific foods in particular. Flavor is at once a broader and more powerful property than taste, one that marries the senses and their associate properties–memory, experience, neurobiology–to create and control the way we eat. The promise that neurogastronomy holds is that once we understand how the mind combines the disparate biological and evocative forces that create flavor, we will be able to circumvent the learned and innate preferences of our taste buds. And with that capacity–truly an example of mind over matter–instead of stimulating appetite via the conventional and unhealthy trifecta of salt, sugar, and fat, we can employ the neural pathways through which flavor is constructed in the brain to divert attention to different, more nutritious foods. Control flavor and you control what we eat–and perhaps, given time and more research, begin fighting the global nutrition problems that are a direct result of the industrialized production of food.”

In one of Oliver Sacks’ “clinical tales,” the popular neurologist describes a man whose identity is threatened by the perpetual dissolution of his self. “He remembered nothing for more than a few seconds. He was continually disoriented. Abysses of amnesia continually opened beneath him, but he would bridge them, nimbly, by fluent confabulations and fictions of all kinds.” Afflicted with a severe case of Korsakoff’s syndrome, a neurological condition brought on by alcoholism, the unfortunate man appears hardly human to Sacks for he lacks all sense of relation and reality. Thus, in reading his patient’s “mythomania,” his prolific production of stories and images, as an illusory substitute for a genuine connection to the world, Sacks’ musings on what remains when forgetting takes hold reach beyond the confines of clinical diagnosis toward a theory of forgetting, imagination, and “iconic” thinking.

It is not by accident then that Sacks was reading Hannah Arendt’s The Life of the Mind when he was writing the narratives of neurological disability, of amnesia and aphasia that populate his 1985 book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. In it, Sacks develops a model of iconic thinking that furthers some of Arendt’s own ideas on the interrelation of thought and the making of images; ideas she herself at least partly borrowed from thinkers in the life science (Adolf Portmann, Konrad Lorenz, and Rudolf Arnheim). My talk will revisit these mutual influences to explore whether forgetting, rather than the “other” of thinking, might itself be considered an operation of thinking, and in particular of “iconic thinking.”

BIO: Jana V. Schmidt’s research pertains to questions of literature and art, their status vis-à-vis the political and the social, image theory, mimesis, and the representation of intersubjectivity. Her main focus as a literary scholar is on twentieth century German and American literature, literary theory (including “continental” philosophy and critical theory), and literature’s relation to violence.

In her critique of the Rights of Man, Hannah Arendt analyzed the problem of the “abstract” human being who was nowhere to be found. If Arendt’s political analyses stemmed from her grappling with the Jewish Question and the problems of minorities or stateless people, this talk takes a different turn. Rather than considering the outcomes of the Rights of Man for subaltern groups or refugees, this talk follows the transformation of the Jewish Question when Jews themselves are no longer a minority, but sovereign citizens in their own ethno-national state. It considers some of the many ways in which Israeli Jews struggle to be Jewish-from conversion and keeping kosher to the everyday surveillance of goats-suggesting that popular sovereignty might not be liberating in the ways we imagine.

BIO: Joyce Dalsheim is currently Assistant Professor in the Department of Global, International and Area Studies at UNC-Charlotte. She is a cultural anthropologist who studies nationalism, religion and the secular, and conflict in Israel/Palestine. She earned her her doctorate from the New School for Social Research, and has taught at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Ben Gurion University of the Negev, and Wake Forest University.

Toni Morrison described Primo Levi’s writing as a “triumph of human identity and worth over the pathology of human destruction.” Levi is the distinguished author of decisive books such as If This Is a Man, and The Periodic Table. For the first time the entire oeuvre of the most acclaimed Holocaust survivor is available in English, after a 7-years collective endeavor lead by Ann Goldstein, New Yorker editor and celebrated translator of Elena Ferrante and Jhumpa Lahiri. Together with Goldstein, the event will feature Michael F. Moore, a most accomplished translator from Italian and UN interpreter.

For more info on Goldstein and the Complete Works of Primo Levi, view interview: HERE.

Primo Levi, (born July 31, 1919, Turin, Italy-died April 11, 1987, Turin), Italian-Jewish writer and chemist, noted for his restrained and moving autobiographical account of and reflections on survival in the Nazi concentration camps.

The Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College announces two post-doctoral fellowships for the 2016-2017 academic year. The fellows should have a Ph.D. in political theory, philosophy, or a related field in the humanities, and his or her work should intersect meaningfully with Hannah Arendt’s thinking. In residence at the Arendt Center, the fellow will pursue his or her independent research at the Center, which includes Hannah Arendt’s personal library. The fellow will have access to Arendt’s Digital Archive through a relationship with the Arendt Center in New York City. In addition, the fellow will have the opportunity to participate in seminars, conferences, lectures, colloquia, and workshops organized by the Center.

To apply for the fellowship, please apply through Interfolio.com at: http://apply.interfolio.com/33792 with a letter of application explaining your research project and interest in the Center and a description of your teaching experience, CV, and two letters of reference.

“Learning From the West African Ebola Epidemic” is a one-day conference in New York City exploring the hypothesis that building public trust in effective organizations is essential for fighting health crises such as Ebola. The conference is grounded in the Global Health Security Agenda that seeks to accelerate progress towards a world safe from infectious disease.

About the Film: A brand new documentary about one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century. The German-Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt caused an uproar in the 1960s by coining the subversive concept of the “Banality of Evil” when referring to the trial of Adolph Eichmann, which she covered for the New Yorker magazine. Her private life was no less controversial thanks to her early love affair with the renowned German philosopher and Nazi supporter Martin Heidegger. This thought provoking and spirited documentary, with its abundance of archival materials, offers an intimate portrait of the whole of Arendt’s life, traveling to places where she lived, worked, loved, and was betrayed, as she wrote about the open wounds of modern times. Through her books, which are still widely read and the recent release of Margarethe von Trotta’s biopic Hannah Arendt (also a Zeitgeist Films release) there is renewed interest in Arendt throughout the world, especially among young people who find her insights into the nature of evil, totalitarianism, ideologies, and the perils faced by refugees, more relevant than ever. Watch the Trailer.

Wednesday, April 6, 2016

Film Forum, 209 West Houston Street West of 6th Ave., New York, NY, Time TBA

This week on the blog, Samantha Hill explains that Arendt never gave an account of her methodology in political theory but in her notes offers us a way to engage the world of political thinking in the Quote of the Week. French writer Anatole France reflects on how education relates to knowledge in this week’s Thoughts on Thinking. Finally, Rukaya Al Zayani shares several images with us of her personal Arendt library and explains how Arendt has influenced her view of the world in this week’s Library feature.

Hannah Arendt considered calling her magnum opus Amor Mundi: Love of the World. Instead, she settled upon The Human Condition. What is most difficult, Arendt writes, is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it. And yet she came to do just that. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection. Above all it means the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.

Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.

To all those “adults” in the press and the chattering classes who are telling kids who “feel the Bern” to grow up, Holly Wood has something she’d like to share: “If Millennials are coming out in droves to support Bernie Sanders, it’s not because we are tripping balls on Geritol. No, Sanders’s clever strategy of shouting the exact same thing for 40 years simply strikes a chord among the growing number of us who now agree: Washington is bought. And every time Goldman Sachs buys another million-dollar slice of the next American presidency, we can’t help but drop the needle onto Bernie’s broken record: The economy is rigged. Democracy is corrupted. The billionaires are on the warpath. Sanders has split the party with hits like these, a catchy stream of pessimistic populism. Behind this arthritic Pied Piper, the youth rally, brandishing red-lettered signs reading ‘MONEYLENDERS OUT.’ If you ask them, they’ll tell you there’s a special place in Hell for war criminals who launch hedge funds…. If anything concerns me at this pivotal moment, it’s not the revolutionary tremors of the youth. Given the Great American Trash Fire we have inherited, this rebellion strikes me as exceedingly reasonable. Pick a crisis, America: Child poverty? Inexcusable. Medical debt? Immoral. For-profit prison? Medieval. Climate change? Apocalyptic. The Middle East is our Vietnam. Flint, the canary in our coal mine. Tamir Rice, our martyred saint. This place is a mess. We’re due for a hard rain. If I am alarmed, it is by the profound languor of the comfortable. What fresh hell must we find ourselves in before those who’ve appointed themselves to lead our thoughts admit that we are in flames? As I see it, to counsel realism when the reality is f–ked is to counsel an adherence to f–kery. Under conditions as distressing as these, acquiescence is absurd. When your nation gets classified as a Class D structure fire, I believe the only wise course is to lose your sh-t.”

For all those “adults” moaning about the unhinged popularity of Donald Trump, Tucker Carlson has something he’d like to say. “Not everyone finds it funny. On my street in Northwest Washington, D.C., there’s never been anyone as unpopular as Trump. The Democrats assume he’s a bigot, pandering to the morons out there in the great dark space between Georgetown and Brentwood. The Republicans (those relatively few who live here) fully agree with that assessment, and they hate him even more. They sense Trump is a threat to them personally, to their legitimacy and their livelihoods. Idi Amin would get a warmer reception in our dog park. I understand it of course. And, except in those moments when the self-righteous silliness of rich people overwhelms me and I feel like moving to Maine, I can see their points, some of them anyway. Trump might not be my first choice for president. I’m not even convinced he really wants the job. He’s smart enough to know it would be tough for him to govern. But just because Trump is an imperfect candidate doesn’t mean his candidacy can’t be instructive. Trump could teach Republicans in Washington a lot if only they stopped posturing long enough to watch carefully…. It turns out the GOP wasn’t simply out of touch with its voters; the party had no idea who its voters were or what they believed. For decades, party leaders and intellectuals imagined that most Republicans were broadly libertarian on economics and basically neoconservative on foreign policy. That may sound absurd now, after Trump has attacked nearly the entire Republican catechism (he savaged the Iraq War and hedge fund managers in the same debate) and been greatly rewarded for it, but that was the assumption the GOP brain trust operated under. They had no way of knowing otherwise. The only Republicans they talked to read the Wall Street Journal too. On immigration policy, party elders were caught completely by surprise. Even canny operators like Ted Cruz didn’t appreciate the depth of voter anger on the subject. And why would they? If you live in an affluent ZIP code, it’s hard to see a downside to mass low-wage immigration. Your kids don’t go to public school. You don’t take the bus or use the emergency room for health care. No immigrant is competing for your job. (The day Hondurans start getting hired as green energy lobbyists is the day my neighbors become nativists.) Plus, you get cheap servants, and get to feel welcoming and virtuous while paying them less per hour than your kids make at a summer job on Nantucket. It’s all good. Apart from his line about Mexican rapists early in the campaign, Trump hasn’t said anything especially shocking about immigration. Control the border, deport lawbreakers, try not to admit violent criminals–these are the ravings of a Nazi? This is the ‘ghost of George Wallace’ that a Politico piece described last August? A lot of Republican leaders think so. No wonder their voters are rebelling.”

This is the most exciting presidential primary season in a generation. Six short months back, we were resigned to the drumbeat of the dynasties. No doubt, Hillary Clinton is the most experienced and qualified candidate for President in decades. And Jeb Bush seems earnest, polished, and smart. But the prospect of choosing between a third Bush or a second Clinton was simply demeaning to democracy. Sadly, it seemed we had no choice. Oh how things have changed. Ted Cruz just became the first Latino candidate to win a major state primary or caucus. Bernie Sanders became the first Jewish American to win a primary. All of this is promising. But nothing comes close to excitement generated by Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump.

Both Sanders and Trump style themselves truthtellers. That does not mean they don’t lie or deceive. Trump seems incapable of dealing with facts and repeats falsehoods with the conviction of someone sure in his power to make fiction into reality. And Sanders is offering up a “plan” to raise the share of government spending in our economy from 21% to over 40%, a shift so radical that he either is deceptive in trumpeting it as a plan or he is delusional in believing in his power to bring about the revolution that would make it possible. But such untruths are the bread and butter of politics. No, in styling themselves truthtellers, both Sanders and Trump allude to another kind of truth. They are saying that they speak from conviction. Trump because he is self-funded and Sanders because he refuses to take Super PAC money and has been saying the same thing for 40 years. Both insist that they speak the truth that is in their hearts, and this separates them from Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton who speak the interests of their donors on Wall Street and K Street.

The appeal in truthtelling is that it speaks from the heart; it is founded upon the fear of hypocrisy. Hypocrisy, as Hannah Arendt writes, is based upon the Greek word for “play-actor.” The hypocrite “falsely pretends to virtue.” He or she “plays a role as consistently as the actor in the play who also must identify himself with his role.” What distinguishes the hypocrite is that his or her duplicity “boomerangs back upon himself, and he is no less a victim of his mendacity than those whom he set out to deceive. Psychologically speaking, one may say that the hypocrite is too ambitious; not only does he want to appear virtuous before others, he wants to convince himself.” The hypocrite, in convincing himself of his goodness, populates the world with “illusions and lying phantoms” and expunges from the world the incorruptible self, “the only core of integrity from which true appearance could arise again.” This is why Arendt calls the hypocrite “rotten to the core” and says of revolutions that they look like “the explosion of an uncorrupted and incorruptible inner core through an outward shell of decay and odorous decreptitude.” What revolutionaries promise, above all, is to tear “the mask of hypocrisy off the face” of a corrupt society, to tear “the façade of corruption down” and expose “behind it the unspoiled, honest face of the people.”

Arendt worries, however, that the “hunt for hypocrites” and the desire to unmask the hypocrite “would leave nothing behind the mask.” What those truthtellers and revolutionaries who would unmask the hypocrites forget, Arendt writes, is that all persons appear in public wearing a mask. The word “person” from the Latin “persona” means that which sounds through a mask. The Roman “person” was a citizen, someone granted the public mask of citizenship and thus someone in whom the law sounded through. To appear unmasked is to appear naked, exposed in one’s raw humanity–someone reduced to a biological or zoological body without any human qualities. In short, the hunt for hypocrites may not emancipate citizens, but it might reduce all citizens to mere natural humans, shorn of the “protecting mask of a legal personality.”

The hunt for hypocrites is a symptom of a corrupt society, and there is a reason that the discourse of hypocrisy is so powerful today. Trump and Sanders both are mobilizing the charge of hypocrisy with justification; there is a reason it is proving effective. But the hunt for hypocrites is a dangerous game, not least because no one can stand to have their private motives exposed to the light of day. Even more dangerous, however, is that the hatred of hypocrisy idealizes a kind of ‘natural’ person, someone who is “nothing behind the mask.” Such a nothing, Arendt argues, may help root out deception, but it also obliterates all truth, insofar as truth too can only sound through a mask. –RB

The Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College is looking for a dependable, hard-working part-time Media Coordinator (20 to 25 hours/week) who can supervise the ongoing evolution of the Center’s impact and media presence, both online and in print. While no deep knowledge of Hannah Arendt is required, we seek someone passionate about the power of ideas to provoke thinking and elevate our public discourse. This job may be done remotely, but the Media Coordinator will need to be on campus at Bard College to assist with major events 2-3 times per year.

Nicola Twilley in the New Yorker does as well as anyone in trying to explain what a gravitational wave is and how it was discovered. “[Rainer] Weiss’s detection method was altogether different from Weber’s. His first insight was to make the observatory ‘L’-shaped. Picture two people lying on the floor, their heads touching, their bodies forming a right angle. When a gravitational wave passes through them, one person will grow taller while the other shrinks; a moment later, the opposite will happen. As the wave expands space-time in one direction, it necessarily compresses it in the other. Weiss’s instrument would gauge the difference between these two fluctuating lengths, and it would do so on a gigantic scale, using miles of steel tubing. ‘I wasn’t going to be detecting anything on my tabletop,’ he said. To achieve the necessary precision of measurement, Weiss suggested using light as a ruler. He imagined putting a laser in the crook of the ‘L.’ It would send a beam down the length of each tube, which a mirror at the other end would reflect back. The speed of light in a vacuum is constant, so as long as the tubes were cleared of air and other particles the beams would recombine at the crook in synchrony–unless a gravitational wave happened to pass through. In that case, the distance between the mirrors and the laser would change slightly. Since one beam would now be covering a shorter distance than its twin, they would no longer be in lockstep by the time they got back. The greater the mismatch, the stronger the wave. Such an instrument would need to be thousands of times more sensitive than any previous device, and it would require delicate tuning in order to extract a signal of vanishing weakness from the planet’s omnipresent din.”

Gillian B. White in The Atlantic writes about new research confirming what many have long known: “For decades, black parents have told their children that in order to succeed despite racial discrimination, they need to be ‘twice as good’: twice as smart, twice as dependable, twice as talented. This advice can be found in everything from literature to television shows, to day-to-day conversation. Now, a new paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research shows that when it comes to getting and keeping jobs, that notion might be more than just a platitude. There’s data that demonstrates the unfortunate reality: Black workers receive extra scrutiny from bosses, which can lead to worse performance reviews, lower wages, and even job loss. The NBER paper, authored by Costas Cavounidis and Kevin Lang, of Boston University, attempts to demonstrate how discrimination factors into company decisions, and creates a feedback loop, resulting in racial gaps in the labor force.”

Christine Gross-Loh takes a peek into what might be the history classroom of the future: “One of the reasons American children often appear to struggle in history, Bain says, is because their knowledge is primarily assessed through multiple-choice tests. Multiple-choice assessment, by nature, often privileges factual content over historical thinking. ‘If you’re testing historical content out of context, that might explain why they don’t do so well,’ Bain says. He advocates embracing the use of narrative–even if that narrative is flawed or one-sided. ‘The grand narrative is pejorative to many in the historical profession–people say that it tries to inculcate a particular viewpoint in kids. But having a big picture or story is cognitively critical to historical knowledge.’ Similarly, history textbooks appear omniscient and objective, and tend to gloss over competing narratives. But educators say that understanding whose narrative is being told helps students to engage with it; even if it is wrong or they disagree with it, the narrative provides context and a more effective way to learn and remember. ‘The argument I make all the time is, it’s like if I were to ask someone to assemble a 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle without the box-top picture of it. You could of course eventually put it together but the effort to match shapes and colors on each piece would be monumental, and you’d likely give up quite quickly. Such is what happens to many kids in school.’… It’s difficult to track down research corroborating the academic benefits of the case method, but anecdotal evidence speaks to its power. Moss tells me he has observed the results of story-based teaching in his classroom. ‘People remember cases incredibly well–and often at a level of detail that’s almost shocking. Stories stick in the mind, and when you learn history with a focus on particular stories it’s much easier to remember the pieces around them.’ David Kaufman, a student who took the course last year, says that discussing history through a series of cases allowed the students to ‘focus a lot more on the process than on, say, the actual legislative result, which I think was much richer.’ It is well known that stories aid learning because of how memory is structured. The cognitive psychologist Jerome Bruner wrote of two modes of knowing: paradigmatic and narrative; with the latter, attention and emotion influence the strength of a memory. Stories activate emotion, which helps students stay engaged and remember. They also feed the human need to fit things into a coherent structure in order to make meaning of them.”

Nicholas B. Dirks, Chancellor of the University of California at Berkeley, sent a letter to the Berkeley community informing them of a “strategic planning process designed to ensure our excellence in the face of continuing financial challenges.” Long term changes to preserve excellence include: “Evaluating our workforce in relationship to our changing needs and resources. This will also entail a new mechanism for the monitoring and control of staffing levels”; “Achieving additional revenues through our ‘brand,’ land, and other assets”; and “the redesign of some of our academic structures. Realignment will ensure that we are excellent in all we choose to do, in our research and in our educational mission.” Here is an excerpt of Chancellor Dirk’s letter: “Today, we announce a strategic planning process designed to ensure our excellence in the face of continuing financial challenges. This process is comprehensive, encompassing academic and administrative realignment, investment in our fundraising and revenue-generating activities, and the reexamination of all our discretionary expenditures, including athletics and capital costs. …Accordingly, we are embarking on a comprehensive strategic planning process, the aim of which is to reimagine the fundamental structures and processes of our university. We need to evaluate how best to structure the university so as to maintain, above all, our excellence as an institution. To be sure, ahead of us lie difficult decisions and hard work, but we are fortunate to be taking this on early enough that we have the resources and time necessary to be thoughtful and strategic…. Every aspect of Berkeley’s operations and organizational structure will be under consideration. Our decision-making, however, will be strategic. We are identifying areas in which new investments will both produce additional resources and enhance our strength; and we are identifying other areas in which the expenditure of resources may be less critical to our overall excellence and core mission. Some important campus-level initiatives, such as the Berkeley Global Campus and the Undergraduate Initiative, will be entirely supported by philanthropy and external partnerships (aside from small amounts of seed funding)…. This endeavor must not be interpreted as an abandonment of our commitment to a public mission nor to our efforts to advocate for increased public funding for higher education. We are fighting to maintain our excellence against those who might equate ‘public’ with mediocrity, against those who have lost faith in the need for higher education to serve as an engine of social mobility, and against those who no longer believe that university-based inquiry and research have the power to shape our society and economy for the better. What we are engaged in here is a fundamental defense of the concept of the public university, a concept that we must reinvent in order to preserve.”

Masha Gessen, noting Moscow’s recent destruction of almost a hundred buildings housing small businesses, suggests that the tear-downs were as much about style as they were about corruption (and they’re definitely about corruption): “The new Russia is not, at present, a fully fledged totalitarian regime–but it increasingly feels like a totalitarian society, with its unanimity on all matters and suspicion of all difference. It wants to look like one too. Back in the eighties, Moscow and other large Soviet cities (with the exception of part of Leningrad) looked empty and orderly. Their avenues were wider than many American highways, with sidewalks the width of a Manhattan street. Their buildings were imperial architecture on steroids, with courtyards the size of a Manhattan block and arches through which you could squeeze a few townhouses. Façades were impenetrable–buildings were often entered through courtyards–and this, combined with the vastness of distances, kept people from clogging the streets. What humans one did see generally looked the same, dressed in basic gray and more gray. The absence of private business kept what passed for commerce looking uniform too. The first legal private commerce consisted of people standing on the sidewalks. In early 1992 Boris Yeltsin issued a decree legalizing the sale of consumer goods by individuals, and some individuals cut the decree out of the newspaper, pinned it to their clothes to ward off police, and went out to procure scarce goods for resale. Foreigners who happened to visit Russia back then will never forget the spectacle of people standing in the street holding out pieces of raw steak or fried chicken–and, perhaps more shockingly, that of others buying these goods. ‘Fresh meat, I just got it today!’ was the advertising slogan of the era. After a few months, the private traders’ assortment grew, along with their sense of security, and they started putting out folding tables for their wares and folding chairs for themselves. Then they started building makeshift structures out of glass, plywood, and aluminum siding. They were eyesores, though still an improvement over the sight of men with raw meat in their hands and a piece of newspaper on their jackets. The structures, known as kiosks, also provided some protection from dirt and weather for both the merchandise and the people who sold it. The sellers could now continue working late into the night… The proliferation of kiosks also brought the city down to human scale. They filled the vast squares and occupied parts of the too-wide sidewalks. They put objects at eye level, filling what had been an eerily empty field of vision. Being a person in Moscow stopped feeling like being a Lilliputian in the land of Gulliver. Over the years, many of the kiosks grew into more permanent structures, often referred to as pavilions. Successful traders erected one- and two-story buildings that connected to the city’s power and plumbing infrastructure, and soon those buildings housed mini-marts, cell-phone shops, and cafés. Some of them were still ugly, usually in a bland prefab way. Others, like a pyramid-shaped glass structure in one of the city’s most central squares, were ostentatiously ridiculous. A few used scaled-down elements of the architecture of surrounding buildings to serve as attractive bridges between larger-than-life Moscow and its people.”

Alfie Bown gets distracted: “Distracting games and websites appear to be totally useless and nothing more than a complete waste of our precious time. But precisely because these distractions are seen as completely wasteful and useless, they make the mundane work we perform for capitalists seem so much the more ‘productive’ and ‘useful’ by contrast. They stimulate a feeling of guilt that sends us back to work eager to make reparations. After we have ‘wasted’ five minutes on Cookie Clicker, we feel like we are carrying out an act that is both productive and reparative when we return to work afterward. Reporting on a recent study, The Entrepreneur, a business magazine, reported that productivity on CRM (Microsoft’s data management server) could be massively increased when workers were allowed to play games. Likewise, the company Snowfly specializes in improving company productivity by employing regulated game use in the workplace. In short, we input data quicker after playing Candy Crush. The idea is the game simply offers a much needed refreshing break, but I think there is more to it than this. By seeming useless and wasteful these distractions not only consolidate our impression that capitalist productivity is comparatively useful and positive, but they also make us feel indebted and keen to make amends. They renew our commitment to capitalist production when we might otherwise be reflecting on how unfulfilling our working conditions are… The usual line would be that a culture of distraction prevents us from concentrating on what is really important and doing truly worthwhile things. This often is nothing more than the age-old generational complaint that young people ought to do something better with their time, and worse, it endorses specific ideas of what ‘worthwhile’ time expenditure consists of, just as Candy Crush does in the very act of distracting us. A culture of distraction doesn’t stop us doing really important things; it makes us believe that there really is something that is really important: capitalist production. Distractions only serve to focus our faith in that myth.”

Brad Evans and Sean Michael Wilson have created a short account of Arendt’s banality of evil, one that is illustrated by Chris Mackenzie. They give a short and schematic account of the Eichmann trial from arrest through judgment and then ask how the banality of evil remains meaningful in the modern world. “Errol Morris’ Film ‘Standard Operating Procedure’ emphasized how these U.S. soldiers were not exceptional but following routine standards. It asked: ‘…How could American values become so compromised that Abu Ghraib could happen?’ This sounds very similar to what was asked of Germany in the Nazi Period…. Again it seems too simple to say such soldiers are crazy or ‘bad apples’. Perhaps these problems of cruel acts carried out in positions of power, of following whatever authorities say in blind obedience are still very much with us. Perhaps the banality of evil is something that, in the wrong circumstances, could touch us all.”

Jazz, as the modern art form that lays claim to improvisation, situates music in a productive tension between individual freedom and a mysterious yet sentient order. As do modern theories of liberalism in politics, Jazz insists both on the individual liberty of each that is through fidelity to common truths, recognition of traditional customs, or embrace of collective ends is rendered compatible with a larger inter-subjective order. Freedom as an art of improvisation means that men are free only insofar as they act in ways that are both free and constrained. This is very much what Hannah Arendt means means when she writes that “Men are free-as distinguished from their possessing the gift of freedom- as long as they act, neither before nor after; for to be free and to act are the same.” In this evening on “A Taste for Chaos: The Hidden Order in the Art of Improvisation,” we bring together leading thinkers and musicians to explore the nature of improvisation and the art of freedom.

Sheldon S. Wolin (August 4, 1922 – October 21, 2015) was one of the most important American political theorists of the 20th century. Wolin authored critical works such as Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought, Hobbes and the Epic Tradition of Political Theory, Presence of the Past: Essays on State and the Constitution, Tocqueville Between Two Worlds: The Making of a Political and Theoretical Life, and Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism. Professor of Politics, Emeritus, at Princeton University, Wolin was the founding editor of the influential journal democracy (1981-1983), with the help Nicholas Xenos. In memory of Wolin, we discuss the work of political theory with Nicholas Xenos.

In one of Oliver Sacks’ “clinical tales,” the popular neurologist describes a man whose identity is threatened by the perpetual dissolution of his self. “He remembered nothing for more than a few seconds. He was continually disoriented. Abysses of amnesia continually opened beneath him, but he would bridge them, nimbly, by fluent confabulations and fictions of all kinds.” Afflicted with a severe case of Korsakoff’s syndrome, a neurological condition brought on by alcoholism, the unfortunate man appears hardly human to Sacks for he lacks all sense of relation and reality. Thus, in reading his patient’s “mythomania,” his prolific production of stories and images, as an illusory substitute for a genuine connection to the world, Sacks’ musings on what remains when forgetting takes hold reach beyond the confines of clinical diagnosis toward a theory of forgetting, imagination, and “iconic” thinking.

It is not by accident then that Sacks was reading Hannah Arendt’s The Life of the Mind when he was writing the narratives of neurological disability, of amnesia and aphasia that populate his 1985 book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. In it, Sacks develops a model of iconic thinking that furthers some of Arendt’s own ideas on the interrelation of thought and the making of images; ideas she herself at least partly borrowed from thinkers in the life science (Adolf Portmann, Konrad Lorenz, and Rudolf Arnheim). My talk will revisit these mutual influences to explore whether forgetting, rather than the “other” of thinking, might itself be considered an operation of thinking, and in particular of “iconic thinking.”

BIO: Jana V. Schmidt’s research pertains to questions of literature and art, their status vis-à-vis the political and the social, image theory, mimesis, and the representation of intersubjectivity. Her main focus as a literary scholar is on twentieth century German and American literature, literary theory (including “continental” philosophy and critical theory), and literature’s relation to violence.

The Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College announces two post-doctoral fellowships for the 2016-2017 academic year. The fellows should have a Ph.D. in political theory, philosophy, or a related field in the humanities, and his or her work should intersect meaningfully with Hannah Arendt’s thinking. In residence at the Arendt Center, the fellow will pursue his or her independent research at the Center, which includes Hannah Arendt’s personal library. The fellow will have access to Arendt’s Digital Archive through a relationship with the Arendt Center in New York City. In addition, the fellow will have the opportunity to participate in seminars, conferences, lectures, colloquia, and workshops organized by the Center.

To apply for the fellowship, please apply through Interfolio.com at: http://apply.interfolio.com/33792 with a letter of application explaining your research project and interest in the Center and a description of your teaching experience, CV, and two letters of reference.

“Learning From the West African Ebola Epidemic” is a one-day conference in New York City exploring the hypothesis that building public trust in effective organizations is essential for fighting health crises such as Ebola. The conference is grounded in the Global Health Security Agenda that seeks to accelerate progress towards a world safe from infectious disease.

About the Film: A brand new documentary about one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century. The German-Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt caused an uproar in the 1960s by coining the subversive concept of the “Banality of Evil” when referring to the trial of Adolph Eichmann, which she covered for the New Yorker magazine. Her private life was no less controversial thanks to her early love affair with the renowned German philosopher and Nazi supporter Martin Heidegger. This thought provoking and spirited documentary, with its abundance of archival materials, offers an intimate portrait of the whole of Arendt’s life, traveling to places where she lived, worked, loved, and was betrayed, as she wrote about the open wounds of modern times. Through her books, which are still widely read and the recent release of Margarethe von Trotta’s biopic Hannah Arendt (also a Zeitgeist Films release) there is renewed interest in Arendt throughout the world, especially among young people who find her insights into the nature of evil, totalitarianism, ideologies, and the perils faced by refugees, more relevant than ever. Watch the Trailer.

Wednesday, April 8, 2016

Film Forum, 209 West Houston Street West of 6th Ave., New York, NY, Time TBA

This week on the blog, Ian Storey looks to the Iowa Caucuses to wonder at what point electoral politics is reduced to the manufacture of crisis in the Quote of the Week. Anne Frank reflects on the irrevocable right to have an opinion in this week’s Thoughts on Thinking. Finally, we appreciate Arendt’s annotations with regards to how trust factors into Locke’s Two Treatises of Government in this week’s Library feature.

Hannah Arendt considered calling her magnum opus Amor Mundi: Love of the World. Instead, she settled upon The Human Condition. What is most difficult, Arendt writes, is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it. And yet she came to do just that. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection. Above all it means the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.

Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.

The New York Supreme Court recently decided Gifford v. McCarthy, a case that turned on the question of whether a Christian couple can deny a gay couple the right to marry on private land. “Petitioners Cynthia Gifford and Robert Gifford own and operate petitioner Liberty Ridge Farm, LLC, a nearly 100-acre property located in the Town of Schaghticoke, Rensselaer County. Registered as a limited liability corporation, Liberty Ridge is not a member organization, a non-profit organization or a religious entity. In addition to harvesting and selling various crops to the public, Liberty Ridge rents portions of the farm to the public as a venue for, among other things, wedding ceremonies and receptions. It hosts both religious and secular wedding ceremonies on the farm. When providing a venue site, Liberty Ridge offers several wedding-related event services, including transportation of guests within the premises, a light beverage station, decoration and set-up services, flower arrangements and event coordination. Such services are provided primarily by the Giffords themselves, particularly Cynthia Gifford, who serves as the ‘event coordinator.’ Liberty Ridge also offers food and beverages for wedding receptions through a catering contract and employs catering, kitchen and wait staff for that purpose. In October 2011, respondents Melisa McCarthy and Jennifer McCarthy–a same-sex couple–became engaged to be married. Approximately a year later, Melisa McCarthy spoke with Cynthia Gifford on the telephone concerning Liberty Ridge as a venue for her wedding ceremony and reception. During their conversation, Melisa McCarthy used the female pronoun to refer to her fiancée, thus indicating that she was engaged to a woman. Cynthia Gifford promptly interjected that there was ‘a problem’ and that the farm did ‘not hold same[-]sex marriages.’ In response to Melisa McCarthy’s query as to the reason for not allowing same-sex marriages, Cynthia Gifford explained that ‘it’s a decision that my husband and I have made that that’s not what we wanted to have on the farm.’ The McCarthys thereafter filed complaints and amended complaints with respondent State Division of Human Rights (hereinafter SDHR) alleging that petitioners engaged in unlawful discriminatory practices based upon sexual orientation.”

Specifically, the McCarthys invoked the NY Human Rights Law, the purpose of which is “‘to assure that every individual within this state is afforded an equal opportunity to enjoy a full and productive life’ by ‘eliminat[ing] and prevent[ing] discrimination in employment, in places of public accommodation, resort or amusement, in educational institutions, in public services, in housing accommodations, in commercial space and in credit transactions.'” In finding that the Giffords violated the Mccarthys’ human rights, the court ultimately handed down its ruling based upon the definition of a public accommodation. “Executive Law § 292 (9) ‘defines “place of public accommodation, resort or amusement” inclusively and illustratively, not specifically, and sets forth an extensive list of examples of places within the statute’ …. Such term includes ‘establishments dealing with goods or services of any kind’ and ‘any place where food is sold for consumption on the premises’ (Executive Law § 292 [9]). Over the years, the statutory definition has been expanded repeatedly, ‘provid[ing] a clear indication that the Legislature used the phrase place of public accommodation “in the broad sense of providing conveniences and services to the public” and that it intended that the definition of place of accommodation should be interpreted liberally.'”

As a matter of NY law, the court appears to be correct. But we do need to ask what such a broad and expanded definition of public accommodation does to the right of privacy and also to the right of free association. The court writes that the Giffords “open Liberty Ridge to the public as a venue for wedding ceremonies and receptions and offer several wedding-related event services in connection therewith.” But is there not a difference between someone who opens a hair salon and someone else who once or twice a week cuts people’s hair in her kitchen? Hannah Arendt agrees that we have a clear and necessary right to ride buses and sit where we want on public transportation, even if the company that operates the buses or trains is private. For Arendt, “when we are dealing with services that everyone needs in order to pursue his business and lead his life,” the business is clearly public, even if privately owned. This includes also the “right to enter hotels and restaurants in business districts.” But Arendt argues that not all places of business are public; she writes, “If as a Jew I wish to spend my vacations only in the company of Jews, I cannot see how anyone can reasonably prevent my doing so; just as I seen no reason why other resorts should not cater to a clientele that wishes not to see Jews while on a holiday. There cannot be a ‘right to go into any hotel or recreation area or place of amusement,’ because many of these are in the realm of the purely social where the right to free association, and therefore to discrimination, has greater validity than the principle of equality.” The questions Arendt raises are essential if we are going to maintain meaningful rights of both free association and privacy.–RB

Elif Batuman describes her brief flirtation with wearing a hijab in Turkey: “I found myself thinking about high heels. High heels were painful, and, for me at least, expensive, because they made walking more difficult and I ended up taking more taxis. Yet there were many times when I wore heels to work-related events in New York, specifically because I felt it made people treat me with more consideration. Why, then, would I refuse to wear a head scarf, which brought a similar benefit of social acceptance, without the disadvantage of impeding my ability to stand or walk? And yet, when I thought about leaving the scarf on for the rest of my stay, something about it felt dishonest, almost shameful, as if I were duping people into being kind to me. Those girls who smiled into my eyes–they thought I was like them. The guy who helped me on the bus–he thought I was his sister. At that point, another thought came to me, a kind of fantasy, so foreign that I could barely articulate it even to myself: What if I really did it? What if I wore a scarf not as a disguise but somehow for real? I was thirty-four, and I’d been having a lot of doubts about the direction my life was taking. I had had an abortion the previous year, with some reluctance, and everything–every minor defeat, every sign of unfriendliness–still hurt a little extra. I had never felt so alone, and in a way that seemed suddenly to have been of my design, as if I had chosen this life without realizing it, years earlier, when I set out to become a writer. And now a glimmer appeared before me of a totally different way of being than any I had imagined, a life with clear rules and duties that you followed, in exchange for which you were respected and honored and safe. You had children–not maybe but definitely. You didn’t have to worry that your social value was irrevocably tied to your sexual value. You had less freedom, true. But what was so great about freedom? What was so great about being a journalist and going around being a pain in everyone’s a–, having people either be suspicious and mean to you or try to use you for their P.R. strategy? Travelling alone, especially as a woman, especially in a patriarchal culture, can be really stressful. It can make you question the most basic priorities around which your life is arranged. Like: Why do I have a job that makes me travel alone? For literature? What’s literature?”

Adam Thirlwell marvels at Portuguese filmmaker Miguel Gomes’s adaptation of The Arabian Nights into a six-hour anthology that is divided into three parts and then divided again within those, built around stories of Portugal’s recent depression. It is, as the movie itself tells us, an adaptation of form but not of story: “The Arabian Nights, of course–written and rewritten between the tenth and fourteenth centuries, and translated into French by Antoine Galland at the beginning of the eighteenth century–have nourished many subsequent fictions, from Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq to James Joyce. A reader only needs to remember the celebrated names: Aladdin! Sinbad the Sailor! Or the tale that forms its outermost layer, where the Grand Vizier’s daughter Scheherazade tells a story every morning before dawn, to avert her execution by Schahriar, the Sultan driven murderously misogynist on discovering his wife’s infidelity. You can derive a sequence of theorems from the original Nights: that storytelling is a matter of life and death, since an execution can be postponed by a story; that a story can be infinitely extended, because any character is capable of beginning a new supernatural tale; and that what might seem a story about the supernatural may also, or in fact, be a story about power. (Money, in the Nights, is always woozy with transformative potential, all sudden multiplications and terrible subtractions.)… One way of talking about power in fiction is to talk about the marvelous, and while the original Nights represents one of literature’s most exuberant explorations of what the marvelous might mean, it’s a category that perhaps cinema can most fluently investigate–with the absolute materialist authority a film confers on visionary events (like the way in Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Ordet (1955) Inger Borgen seems, very quietly, to rise from the dead). Gomes has his own deadpan way with the supernatural–in his lo-fi filming of Scheherazade in an imaginary seaside Baghdad, or his presentation of a ‘wind genie’ as a man accidentally trapped in a bird-net. But the true meaning of the marvelous, Gomes seems to be suggesting, is in the way a life is constantly being changed by powers beyond its control or prediction–a system of everyday metamorphosis which is at its most intense in an era of austerity poverty. Not, however, that it must always therefore be a record of defeat. There’s a hopeful version of the marvelous too, and it’s visible in the final story, ‘The Inebriating Chorus of the Chaffinches’–a study of bird-trappers in Lisbon’s outer suburbs, living in government housing on the sites of former shanty towns out by the airport. It’s very small, almost nothing, but in the miniature actions of cage-cleaning and bird-training, or the way the trappers invent impossible birdsongs on their computers by combining different melodies into a single artificial track, some kind of small-scale, improvised utopia emerges.”

Amy Brady interviews GMH (a pseudonym) and Robert Gehl (a communications professor), who are the editors of the new literary journal Torist, which is digital and accessible only on the dark web: “Reading through The Torist, you probably won’t find any reasons for why the writers wouldn’t want their identities known. Yes, the pieces share thematic concerns over individual privacy and the consequences of living under government surveillance. But there’s nothing illegal about their complaints. In fact, some of the work is quite good. So why are these writers publishing in The Torist, anyway, a magazine accessible by only a fraction of Internet users, many of them presumably surfing the Dark Web for things other than literary discoveries? The whole project seems downright contrary to what most contemporary writers look for in a literary magazine–namely, an audience. With this question and others (so many) in mind, I sought out the editors of The Torist to see if they could shed some light on their literary contribution to the Dark-Web world. Both agreed to chat, mercifully, via clear-web email. The only exposure this luddite has to encrypted online communication is whatever that hacker character Gavin Orsay was up to in the second season of House of Cards (though I did figure out how to download the magazine). As it turns out, both editors are thoughtful proponents of personal privacy and literary art, dedicated as much to asking questions about what’s possible in literature as to finding solutions to what they see as massive infringements on human rights. They also have some impressive favorite reads.”

While considering filmmaker Laura Poitras’s new exhibit on surveillance art, opening this week at the Whitney, Andy Greenberg relates the story of her life under surveillance: “The exhibit is vast and unsettling, ranging from films to documents that can be viewed only through wooden slits to a video expanse of Yemeni sky which visitors are invited to lie beneath. But the most personal parts of the show are documents that lay bare how excruciating life was for Poitras as a target of government surveillance–and how her subsequent paranoia made her the ideal collaborator in Snowden’s mission to expose America’s surveillance state. First, she’s installed a wall of papers that she received in response to an ongoing Freedom of Information lawsuit the Electronic Frontier Foundation filed on her behalf against the FBI. The documents definitively show why Poitras was tracked and repeatedly searched at the US border for years, and even that she was the subject of a grand jury investigation. And second, a book she’s publishing to accompany the exhibit includes her journal from the height of that surveillance, recording her first-person experience of becoming a spying subject, along with her inner monologue as she first corresponded with the secret NSA leaker she then knew only as ‘Citizenfour.’ Poitras says she initially intended to use only a few quotes from her journal in that book. But as she was transcribing it, she ‘realized that it was a primary source document about navigating a certain reality,’ she says. The finished book, which includes a biographical piece by Guantanamo detainee Lakhdar Boumediene, a photo collection from Ai Weiwei, and a short essay by Snowden on using radio waves from stars to generate random data for encryption, is subtitled ‘A Survival Guide for Living Under Total Surveillance.’ It will be published widely on February 23. ‘I’ve asked people for a long time to reveal a lot in my films,’ Poitras says. But telling her own story, even in limited glimpses, ‘provides a concrete example of how the process works we don’t usually see.’ That process, for Poitras, is the experience of being unwittingly ingested into the American surveillance system.”

Richard Lea opens up about the digital novel: “Publisher Anna Gerber isn’t trying to kill off the printed book–she’d just like you to spend a bit more time on your mobile. ‘We don’t really think the point is to change the way we read,’ she says, ‘but we do like the idea of trying to immerse readers in books on their phones.’ Gerber has been pushing at the boundaries of the printed page since she and Britt Iversen founded Visual Editions in 2010, a publisher of mould-breaking books including Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes and Marc Saporta’s Composition No 1. Now Visual Editions has teamed up with Google Creative Lab in Sydney to create Editions at Play, a publishing project and online bookstore that sells books that ‘cannot be printed’, with each one available through Google Play. ‘We’re trying to make books that are delightful, surprising and completely unprintable,’ Gerber says. ‘They’re not games and they’re not apps–they’re all built out of HTML–but each one is impossible to envisage on paper.’ …’People like to talk about how physical books have qualities that don’t transfer well to digital,’ says Iversen. ‘We want to show that digital books can have narrative and visual qualities that champion writing but can’t be transferred to print. You wouldn’t really sit and read a novel while at your desktop would you? You’re more likely to curl up on your sofa or armchair and read a book–and you can do that on your phone just as easily as you can with a paperback.’ With Editions at Play, Iversen, Gerber and Google are trying to create books that draw people in, so that they might spend an hour with a book on their phone ‘in the way they might on Facebook–only to feel better about themselves once they have.'”

Hilton Obenzinger tells a story of Jane Kinzler and John Jacobs. Jacobs was a campus radical at Columbia in the 1960s. Kinzler, his girlfriend, lived in the same apartment building as Hannah Arendt. According to Kinzler, Jacobs and Arendt formed a unique relationship: “Many times, when John came by the apartment on 109th St and Riverside Drive he would put a tie on his blue work shirt. He would comb his fingers through his long tangled hair and go up a few floors to ring Hannah Arendt’s doorbell. He would be gone for an hour or so and come back with his mind on fire, his eyes sparkling, his wild hair seeming to give off sparks. John was already very intense, but after a little time with Hannah Arendt he was electric. The philosopher had very mixed feelings about student revolutionaries, and their move toward more militant protests: she liked the energy of the young, their sheer courage, their ‘astounding will to action,’ as John quoted her; they were the generation that could imagine worldwide destruction and could hear the ticking of the bomb, yet they had ‘supreme confidence in the possibility of change.’ She told him that the whole idea of ‘a student rebellion almost exclusively inspired by moral considerations certainly belongs among the totally unexpected events of this century.’ John thrilled at Arendt’s brilliance, and her praise. But Hannah Arendt would also criticize radicals, especially Chairman Mao, and John would argue with her. She was writing on violence and thought the idea that, ‘Power grows out of a barrel of gun’ was ridiculous. For sure, Marx knew about violence in history, but it was secondary, Arendt would argue; principally, it would be the contradictions within the old society that would bring it down. Mao’s words were thoroughly non-Marxist to her. Violence certainly precedes a new society, like labor pains, but it does not cause its birth, she explained. Power comes from the people’s support of the institutions of a country, by consent, or withdrawing consent. As John described it, Arendt thought violence is more often useless as a tactic. ‘Revolutions are not made,’ she said. He puzzled over that.”

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Jazz, as the modern art form that lays claim to improvisation, situates music in a productive tension between individual freedom and a mysterious yet sentient order. As do modern theories of liberalism in politics, Jazz insists both on the individual liberty of each that is through fidelity to common truths, recognition of traditional customs, or embrace of collective ends is rendered compatible with a larger inter-subjective order. Freedom as an art of improvisation means that men are free only insofar as they act in ways that are both free and constrained. This is very much what Hannah Arendt means means when she writes that “Men are free-as distinguished from their possessing the gift of freedom- as long as they act, neither before nor after; for to be free and to act are the same.” In this evening on “A Taste for Chaos: The Hidden Order in the Art of Improvisation,” we bring together leading thinkers and musicians to explore the nature of improvisation and the art of freedom.

Sheldon S. Wolin (August 4, 1922 – October 21, 2015) was one of the most important American political theorists of the 20th century. Wolin authored critical works such as Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought, Hobbes and the Epic Tradition of Political Theory, Presence of the Past: Essays on State and the Constitution, Tocqueville Between Two Worlds: The Making of a Political and Theoretical Life, and Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism. Professor of Politics, Emeritus, at Princeton University, Wolin was the founding editor of the influential journal democracy (1981-1983), with the help Nicholas Xenos. In memory of Wolin, we discuss the work of political theory with Nicholas Xenos.

Jana V. Schmidt’s research pertains to questions of literature and art, their status vis-à-vis the political and the social, image theory, mimesis, and the representation of intersubjectivity. Her main focus as a literary scholar is on twentieth century German and American literature, literary theory (including “continental” philosophy and critical theory), and literature’s relation to violence. One nodal point for these inquiries has been the problem of reconciliation in the aftermath of the Holocaust. How to constitute a “world” after 1945 and how to integrate the victims’ memories into such world-making are crucial questions for her work. Hannah Arendt’s thought on conciliation, her literary writings, and her notion of world have shaped her answers to these questions in her dissertation, “An Aesthetics of Reconciliation – Intersubjectivity after the End of Community, 1945-1970.” Jana’s next project will investigate the figure of the survivor in postwar American literature and public Holocaust discourses. Other interests include Jewish studies, psychoanalysis, phenomenology, memory and memorialization, and the study of exile. An essay on the American painter Philip Guston and Jean-François Lyotard’s notion of the figure is forthcoming with Bloomsbury. Jana holds an MA in English from the University of Pennsylvania and a PhD in Comparative Literature from the State University of New York at Buffalo. She is looking forward to teaching the First Year Seminar at Bard.

The Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College announces two post-doctoral fellowships for the 2016-2017 academic year. The fellows should have a Ph.D. in political theory, philosophy, or a related field in the humanities, and his or her work should intersect meaningfully with Hannah Arendt’s thinking. In residence at the Arendt Center, the fellow will pursue his or her independent research at the Center, which includes Hannah Arendt’s personal library. The fellow will have access to Arendt’s Digital Archive through a relationship with the Arendt Center in New York City. In addition, the fellow will have the opportunity to participate in seminars, conferences, lectures, colloquia, and workshops organized by the Center.

To apply for the fellowship, please apply through Interfolio.com at: http://apply.interfolio.com/33792 with a letter of application explaining your research project and interest in the Center and a description of your teaching experience, CV, and two letters of reference.

“Learning From the West African Ebola Epidemic” is a one-day conference in New York City exploring the hypothesis that building public trust in effective organizations is essential for fighting health crises such as Ebola. The conference is grounded in the Global Health Security Agenda that seeks to accelerate progress towards a world safe from infectious disease.

About the Film: A brand new documentary about one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century. The German-Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt caused an uproar in the 1960s by coining the subversive concept of the “Banality of Evil” when referring to the trial of Adolph Eichmann, which she covered for the New Yorker magazine. Her private life was no less controversial thanks to her early love affair with the renowned German philosopher and Nazi supporter Martin Heidegger. This thought provoking and spirited documentary, with its abundance of archival materials, offers an intimate portrait of the whole of Arendt’s life, traveling to places where she lived, worked, loved, and was betrayed, as she wrote about the open wounds of modern times. Through her books, which are still widely read and the recent release of Margarethe von Trotta’s biopic Hannah Arendt (also a Zeitgeist Films release) there is renewed interest in Arendt throughout the world, especially among young people who find her insights into the nature of evil, totalitarianism, ideologies, and the perils faced by refugees, more relevant than ever. Watch the Trailer.

Wednesday, April 8, 2016

Film Forum, 209 West Houston Street West of 6th Ave., New York, NY, Time TBA

This week on the blog, N. A. J. Taylor observes that if we are to have an Arendtian nuclear theory we must now construct it ourselves in the Quote of the Week. Paul Valery reflects on how man relates to his thoughts in this week’s Thoughts on Thinking. Finally, we appreciate the annotations Hannah Arendt made to an anthology of essays on political thought in this week’s Library feature.

Hannah Arendt considered calling her magnum opus Amor Mundi: Love of the World. Instead, she settled upon The Human Condition. What is most difficult, Arendt writes, is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it. And yet she came to do just that. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection. Above all it means the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.

Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.

Isabel Kershner in the New York Times reports that a pardon request by Adolf Eichmann was recently discovered–along with other original documents from his 1961 trial. “After he was convicted and sentenced to death in Israel for his role in the annihilation of millions of Jews by Nazi Germany, Adolf Eichmann pleaded for his own life. ‘There is a need to draw a line between the leaders responsible and the people like me forced to serve as mere instruments in the hands of the leaders,’ pleaded Eichmann–the Nazi war criminal who oversaw the lethal logistics of the Holocaust–in a letter dated May 29, 1962, the day that Israel’s Supreme Court rejected his appeal. Eichmann asked the Israeli president, Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, for a pardon, arguing, ‘I was not a responsible leader, and as such do not feel myself guilty.'” Eichmann’s attempt to deny responsibility mirrors his arguments at his trial. But Kershner goes further and wrongly suggests that Arendt agreed with Eichmann’s appraisal. Kershner writes: “Eichmann’s role and influence in the Nazi machine has been the subject of historical debate. David Cesarani, a historian of 20th-century Jewish life who died last year, wrote a biography of Eichmann that cast him as a committed subscriber to Nazi ideology, rebutting the author Hannah Arendt’s famous appraisal of him as a banal bureaucrat who simply followed orders.”

Kershner’s suggestion that Arendt thought Eichmann was a bureaucrat who simply followed orders is a common misunderstanding. Over and again in Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt says that the defense that he was following orders was Eichmann’s own argument, and she rejects it. While Eichmann was a bureaucrat, Arendt emphasizes that he also disobeyed orders when those orders contradicted what he took to be Hitler’s commands or his understanding of Nazi policy. Eichmann was not simply a follower of orders; he also took initiative and sought to innovate in carrying out his genocidal tasks. Quite simply, what Arendt means by calling Eichmann’s banal is not the banality of a bureaucrat who simply follows orders. That mistaken interpretation of Eichmann was made famous by Stanley Milgram. Arendt rejects Milgram’s conclusion that all of us have a bit of Eichmann in ourselves and that normal people obey orders they don’t support. On the contrary, Arendt argues that “obedience and support are the same.”

The claim that Arendt saw Eichmann as a banal bureaucrat mistakes Arendt’s argument about banality. To be banal is not to follow orders; it is to be thoughtless. Eichmann was banal because he could not think from the perspective of others. As I write in the latest volume of HA: The Journal of the Hannah Arendt Center, “Locked in the logical coherence of his own simplified view of the world, Eichmann held fast to the truths that gave meaning to his fantastic version of the world. In short, Eichmann was a dedicated Nazi. He sought and worked for a Nazi victory, and he was willing to do anything and everything within his power to contribute to the cause. He did not think hard or at all about that cause; Arendt wonders if he really understood it. But Arendt understands that Eichmann’s thoughtlessness names his willingness to do anything for a cause. What drove Eichmann to become a dedicated mass murderer was less hatred than a deep need to serve the Nazi movement that gave his life weight and importance.” Bureaucrats can be thoughtless, of course. but Arendt saw that Eichmann’s thoughtlessness was not the thoughtlessness of a bureaucrat so much as it was driven by a deep need to find meaning and worth in belonging to the Nazi movement. She does not see him as simply following orders. The reason he must be hung, as she argues he must, is not that he obeyed orders but that he supported those orders. Eichmann claimed–and there is evidence to support him–that he personally disagreed with some of the orders. But the facts are that he overcame his objections and fully and enthusiastically carried out those orders. Eichmann took pride in the fact that he suppressed his personal and subjective revulsion and acted heroically for the good of a cause larger than himself. He did so, as Arendt saw, because he found his self worth in belonging to a world-historical movement. Read more here.–RB

Jedediah Purdy, at the end of the armed standoff over public lands in Oregon, considers Ammon Bundy and the other occupiers: “Finicum had told reporters that he would rather die in the occupation than go to jail. He seems to have regarded this as the proper and lawful attitude of a citizen. The Malheur occupation, which was triggered by disputes over ranchers’ use of public lands, has also been a theatrical public argument about the scope of legal violence in America. For nearly four weeks after the Bundys and their allies occupied Malheur, on January 2nd, it was the federal government that stood down as armed men (and a few women) defied its authority, used its buildings as a staging ground for a thoroughly improbable scheme to bring public lands under state and local control, and promised to meet force with force. As LaVoy Finicum must have known, a person facing arrest is not entitled to meet force with force, but really the occupiers were promising to meet law with counter-law. In their constitutional cosmology, a localist version of rock-ribbed originalism, they were the law in Malheur, and the federal agents the usurpers. Federal agents tolerated this secessionist theatre, allowing the occupiers to leave the refuge for groceries, permitting supporters to join the occupation, and even keeping electricity flowing to Malheur headquarters. But this indulgent attitude, presumably intended to avoid repeating the disastrous nineteen-nineties confrontations at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, and Waco, Texas, could not last indefinitely. There could not be two governments in Malheur. The federal stance, which looked from the outside like diplomacy, turned out to be police strategy instead. When Ammon Bundy and other leaders left the refuge, they were done…. It is not a coincidence that only white men have filled this role, nor that the Ku Klux Klan is the major example of such vigilantism in the hundred and fifty years since the Civil War. That the Bundys imagined that their gathering could speak for ‘the people’ of the Western states, let alone of the country, revealed how anachronistic and narrow their vision of the country was. All ‘occupy’ movements, whatever they call themselves, have the problem that they claim to represent the people while being, in fact, a partisan fragment.”

Jonathan Chait goes beyond the silly complaint that Bernie Sanders is an idealist or that he won’t be able to get all of his proposed policies passed. Idealism is hardly a sin. Indeed it is a requirement for leadership. But Chait finds a deeper worry in Sanders’s candidacy. “Note that Sanders, asked about Republican opposition to his proposals, defined that opposition as ‘protecting the interest of the wealthy and the powerful.’ It is certainly true that fealty to the interests of the rich heavily colors Republican policy. But Sanders is not merely presenting corruption as one factor. It is the entirety of it. Likewise, Sanders has difficulty imagining any reason other than corruption to explain disagreements by fellow Democrats, which he relentlessly attributes to the nefarious influence of corporate wealth. One does not have to dismiss the political power of massed wealth to acknowledge that other things influence the conclusions drawn by Americans who don’t share Sanders’s full diagnosis. In reality, people have organic reasons to vote Republican. Some of them care more about social issues or foreign policy than economics. Sanders would embrace many concepts–‘socialism,’ big government in the abstract, and middle-class tax increases–that register badly with the public. People are very reluctant to give up their health insurance, even if it is true that Sanders could give them something better. What’s more, the interests of the wealthy do not cut as cleanly as Sanders indicates. It’s true that business and the rich tend to oppose parts of his program like higher taxes on the rich, more generous social insurance, and tougher regulation of finance. But the Obama administration’s stimulus encountered intense Republican opposition even though it did not pose a threat to any business interests. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce even endorsed the stimulus, which profited business both directly (by pumping billions into contracts for projects like infrastructure) and indirectly (by goosing public demand for its members’ products). That did not stop 100 percent of House Republicans from opposing it. Nor did the unified opposition of the business lobby dissuade Republicans from holding the debt ceiling hostage in 2011, or persuade them to pass immigration reform in 2013. Sanders currently proposes a massive infrastructure program, which would make lots of money for the construction industry. Clearly, subservience to big business only goes so far in explaining Republican behavior. The depiction of conservatism as a mere cover for greed is a habit Sanders indulges over and over.”

In short, Chait worries that there is a bit too much of the ideological true believer in Sanders, that he is someone who sees the entire world and all the problems of the world through one single lens: the evils of wealthy people and capitalism. Hannah Arendt argues that “an ideology differs from a simple opinion in that it claims to possess either the key to history, or the solution for all the ‘riddles of the universe,’ or the intimate knowledge of the hidden universal laws which are supposed to rule nature and man.” We are all subject to the charm of ideology now and then. But ideologies become problematic, and dangerous, when they are believed. Arendt writes: “Ideologies are harmless, uncritical and arbitrary opinions only as long as they are not believed in seriously. Once their claim to total validity is taken literally they become the nuclei of logical systems in which, as in the systems of paranoics, everything follows as comprehensibly and even compulsorily once the first premise is accepted…. The curious logicality of all isms, their simpleminded trust in the salvation of stubborn devotion without regard for specific, varying factors, already harbors the first germs of totalitarian contempt for reality and factuality.” There is, no doubt, some truth behind Sanders’s relentless focus on income inequality and political corruption. The question Chait raises is whether focusing so sharply on one explanation for our political dysfunction purports to reveal a common truth but actually expresses a partisan fragment.–RB

Wyatt Mason in the NYRB discusses Laila Lalami’s writing about being a Muslim in the West. “Shortly after the terrorist attacks in Paris on November 13, 2015, an essay by the Moroccan-born writer Laila Lalami appeared in The New York Times Magazine. In ‘My Life as a Muslim in the West’s “Gray Zone,”‘ Lalami, whose Ph.D. is in linguistics and who regularly produces opinion pieces, criticism, and essays on a range of cultural and human rights subjects, discussed some of the challenges she has faced during her quarter-century as a Muslim immigrant to the United States: ‘Some months ago, I gave a reading from my most recent novel in Scottsdale, Ariz. During the discussion that followed, a woman asked me to talk about my upbringing in Morocco. It’s natural for readers to be curious about a writer they’ve come to hear, I told myself. I continued to tell myself this even after the conversation drifted to Islam, and then to ISIS. Eventually, another woman raised her hand and said that the only Muslims she saw when she turned on the television were extremists. “Why aren’t we hearing more from people like you?” she asked me. “You are,” I said with a nervous laugh. “Right now.” I wanted to tell her that there were plenty of ordinary Muslims in this country. We come in all races and ethnicities. Some of us are more visible by virtue of beards or head scarves. Others are less conspicuous, unless they give book talks and it becomes clear that they, too, identify as Muslims.'” Mason continues, at the end of his essay: “As I write this, Donald Trump has spent the past few weeks hinting at and then saying explicitly that were he elected president, he would establish a database to track Muslims in the United States. That the outcry against such stupidity has been swift comes as no less a relief than his continued and increasing lead over his fellow Republican candidates remains a harbinger of a profound civic disorder. But such clearly unacceptable ideas–historically unacceptable; morally unacceptable; intellectually unacceptable; constitutionally unacceptable–have been muddled further by reactions to the horrendous news that a Muslim couple in San Bernardino (the wife swore her allegiance to ISIS on Facebook) slaughtered fourteen people at an event for employees of the county Public Health Department where the husband worked. ‘Our nation is under siege,’ Chris Christie said, campaigning in Iowa, after hearing of the shooting. ‘What I believe we’re facing is the next world war. This is what we’re in right now, already.’ And Jeb Bush broadsided that ‘they have declared war on us, and we need to declare war on them.’ That the prior week’s shooting at a Planned Parenthood by a devout Christian gunman did not produce a similar rhetorical outcry by the same candidates is, unambiguously, a difference based in race–in racism. It is a clear call to people of conscience that to be Muslim in America right now is to be enduring a period of terror in the land of the free. As Lalami wrote in The New York Times Magazine: ‘Terrorist attacks affect all of us in the same way: We experience sorrow and anger at the loss of life. For Muslims, however, there is an additional layer of grief as we become subjects of suspicion. Muslims are called upon to condemn terrorism, but no matter how often or how loud or how clear the condemnations, the calls remain. Imagine if, after every mass shooting in a school or a movie theater in the United States, young white men in this country were told that they must publicly denounce gun violence. The reason this is not the case is that we presume each young white man to be solely responsible for his actions, whereas Muslims are held collectively responsible. To be a Muslim in the West is to be constantly on trial.'”

Lizzie Wade thinks there’s something to admire in those who think the world is flat: “Take a look especially at the tweet that started it all: ‘The cities in the background are approx. 16 miles apart … where is the curve? please explain this.’ There’s something touchingly genuine about this to me, some deep seated desire to work through confusion and toward truth. This isn’t a man who never learned science, or who has some fundamentalist objection to examining empirical evidence about the world. This is a man who has looked at the world around him and decided that mainstream science isn’t doing a good job at explaining what he sees. So he’s collecting evidence, seeking out literature by well-versed ‘experts,’ and working out a better theory on his own. This is the hallmark of people I’ve come to think of as outsider physicists. You might know them by other names: loons, kooks, crackpots. Most scientists and science writers consider them a nuisance, as they often clog up our inboxes and even (shudder) voicemails with their wacky theories, desperate for validation. I occasionally get those emails, and I almost always ignore them. But years ago, the physicist-turned-science-writer Margaret Wertheim decided to pay attention to the fringe theories that came her way. ‘The Big Bang theory accepted by a majority of scientists constitutes the greatest blunder and misinterpretation in the history of cosmology.’ The universe is a ’12 lobed Raspberry in a dodecahedral configuration.’ And oh so many more. Some had an internal logic she could follow. Others made no sense at all. But as she wrote in her 2011 book Physics on the Fringe, their architects all shared a sense that physics had veered woefully off-track somewhere around the time it started relying on differential equations to describe invisible phenomenon, from magnetic fields to Higgs bosons. In the last 150 years or so, physics has taken a turn away from the intuitive and toward the abstract. It’s not rolling balls and falling apples anymore; it’s quantum states and curved spacetime. (And let’s not even get into string theory, which might as well be an outsider theory itself for all the experimental evidence it has backing it up–i.e., none so far.) That turn has left some people–perhaps B.o.B included–extremely unsettled. Physics is supposed to be about understanding the world I live in, they think. But I don’t see any time dilation/entangled quarks/curvature of the Earth when I look around me. Why should I trust this math I can’t understand over what I see with my own eyes?” The parting of science and common sense is one of the starting points of Arendt’s The Human Condition. The true world of science is one increasingly inaccessible to human understanding and human speech–even leading scientists know an increasingly partial and specialized bit of truth and cannot understand and explain what their colleagues in other fields know. One result is what Arendt calls world alienation, a skepticism about common sense. This loss of a faith in the common world is the root of our increasing inability to distinguish truth from lies.

An anonymous blogger (apparently scared of recrimination) writes on Blue Nation Review about her experience reading all of the emails Hillary Clinton wrote that were released during the month of August. The blogger, who had been a Clinton hater, fell for the former Secretary of State while reading her immense paper trail. “Her tenure as Secretary of State, of course, led to the bogus email scandal, which in turn led to the slow-drip release of the emails on her home server. I decided I was going to read them. In those emails, I discovered a Hillary Clinton I didn’t even know existed. I found a woman who cared about employees who lost loved ones. I found a woman who, without exception, took time to write notes of condolence and notes of congratulations, no matter how busy she was. I found a woman who could be a tough negotiator and firm in her expectations, but still had a moment to write a friend with encouragement in tough times. She worried over people she didn’t know, and she worried over those she did. And everywhere she went, her concern for women and children was clearly the first and foremost thing on her mind. In those emails, I also found a woman who seemed to understand power and how to use it wisely. A woman of formidable intellect who actually understood the nuances of a thing, and how to strike a tough bargain. I read every single one of the emails released in August, and what I found was someone who actually gave a damn about the country, the Democratic party, and all of our futures. She watched along with all of us as the Affordable Care Act made its way through Congress, with the same anxiety and aggravation many of us felt, and she rejoiced when it finally passed. She knew the Democrats who voted against it in the House, and she knew the ones who put their political careers on the line in support of it. The Hillary caricature you see in the press is not the Hillary Clinton I came to know by reading those emails. Yes, she had powerful friends in powerful places–though I didn’t actually see any emails from Goldman Sachs. And yes, she approached those friends the very same way she approached people on her staff, or people she met in the course of being Secretary of State. She rejoiced in their joys and shared their sorrows. They weren’t just ticks on a political scoreboard. They were friends. You could tell there were some squabbles internally with other members of the Obama administration, but there was also unflagging, utmost respect for the man who occupied the White House–the office she fought so valiantly to attain.” Clinton has been tone deaf to the email scandal. At the same time, the assumption behind the email scandal is that public employees have no right to private communication. Such an assumption will inevitably lead public figures to avoid exactly the kind of passionate and honest emails that the anonymous blogger finds in the cache of Clinton’s correspondence. If public figures can’t expect some privacy, how will they ever engage in the kind of risky, spontaneous, and honest conversation that is the soil of all thinking?–RB

Ramzi Fawaz considers the utopian potential of the comic book superhero and contrasts it with an approach derived from identity politics: “If one were to try and explain this question by turning to recent public debates about superhero comics, we might put forward the answer: ‘diversity.’ Yet this term and its shifting meanings–variety, difference, or representational equality–would have rung false to my thirteen year old ears. It was not simply the fact of Storm’s ‘diverse’ background as Kenyan, immigrant, woman, or mutant that drew me to her, but rather her ethical orientation towards those around her, her response to human and mutant differences, and her familial bond with her fellow X-Men. These were qualities significantly shaped by her distinct differences, but not identical to them. This was not any traditional idea of diversity then, understood as the mere fact that different kinds of people exist. Rather what Storm and the X-Men embodied was true heterogeneity: not merely the fact of many kinds of people but what those people do in relation to their differences. As I became a dedicated comic book fan, I realized that every issue of the X-Men was both an extended meditation on the fact that people are different from one another, and that this reality requires each and every person to forge substantive, meaningful, intelligent responses to those differences. As a teenage reader, I simply took this fact for granted as part of the pleasures of reading superhero comics. As a scholar years later, I came to realize that the ability to respond to differences and forge meaningful relationships across them was a capacity, a super-power if you will, that comics could train their readers to exercise, an imaginative skill fit for a truly heterogeneous world…. Recent public dialogue about the rapidly diversifying ranks of superhero comic books have overwhelmingly celebrated the increased racial, gender, sexual, and religious variety of America’s greatest fictional heroes. Yet every time a news outlet lauds the major comics companies for introducing a gay superhero, or a Pakistani superhero, or a classically male superhero replaced by a powerful woman, the historian in me thinks, ‘but comics were doing that in 1972, so what’s the big deal now?’ Certainly, one potentially distinct element of today’s push for diversity is the range of ‘real-world’ or identifiable differences comics are willing to name and represent on the comic book page. But in writing The New Mutants, I came to the conclusion that without an underlying democratic ethos or worldview, such real-world differences have little meaning.”

Jazz, as the modern art form that lays claim to improvisation, situates music in a productive tension between individual freedom and a mysterious yet sentient order. As do modern theories of liberalism in politics, Jazz insists both on the individual liberty of each that is through fidelity to common truths, recognition of traditional customs, or embrace of collective ends is rendered compatible with a larger inter-subjective order. Freedom as an art of improvisation means that men are free only insofar as they act in ways that are both free and constrained. This is very much what Hannah Arendt means means when she writes that “Men are free-as distinguished from their possessing the gift of freedom- as long as they act, neither before nor after; for to be free and to act are the same.” In this evening on “A Taste for Chaos: The Hidden Order in the Art of Improvisation,” we bring together leading thinkers and musicians to explore the nature of improvisation and the art of freedom.

Sheldon S. Wolin (August 4, 1922 – October 21, 2015) was one of the most important American political theorists of the 20th century. Wolin authored critical works such as Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought, Hobbes and the Epic Tradition of Political Theory, Presence of the Past: Essays on State and the Constitution, Tocqueville Between Two Worlds: The Making of a Political and Theoretical Life, and Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism. Professor of Politics, Emeritus, at Princeton University, Wolin was the founding editor of the influential journal democracy (1981-1983), with the help Nicholas Xenos. In memory of Wolin, we discuss the work of political theory with Nicholas Xenos.

Jana V. Schmidt’s research pertains to questions of literature and art, their status vis-à-vis the political and the social, image theory, mimesis, and the representation of intersubjectivity. Her main focus as a literary scholar is on twentieth century German and American literature, literary theory (including “continental” philosophy and critical theory), and literature’s relation to violence. One nodal point for these inquiries has been the problem of reconciliation in the aftermath of the Holocaust. How to constitute a “world” after 1945 and how to integrate the victims’ memories into such world-making are crucial questions for her work. Hannah Arendt’s thought on conciliation, her literary writings, and her notion of world have shaped her answers to these questions in her dissertation, “An Aesthetics of Reconciliation – Intersubjectivity after the End of Community, 1945-1970.” Jana’s next project will investigate the figure of the survivor in postwar American literature and public Holocaust discourses. Other interests include Jewish studies, psychoanalysis, phenomenology, memory and memorialization, and the study of exile. An essay on the American painter Philip Guston and Jean-François Lyotard’s notion of the figure is forthcoming with Bloomsbury. Jana holds an MA in English from the University of Pennsylvania and a PhD in Comparative Literature from the State University of New York at Buffalo. She is looking forward to teaching the First Year Seminar at Bard.

The Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College announces two post-doctoral fellowships for the 2016-2017 academic year. The fellows should have a Ph.D. in political theory, philosophy, or a related field in the humanities, and his or her work should intersect meaningfully with Hannah Arendt’s thinking. In residence at the Arendt Center, the fellow will pursue his or her independent research at the Center, which includes Hannah Arendt’s personal library. The fellow will have access to Arendt’s Digital Archive through a relationship with the Arendt Center in New York City. In addition, the fellow will have the opportunity to participate in seminars, conferences, lectures, colloquia, and workshops organized by the Center.

To apply for the fellowship, please apply through Interfolio.com at: http://apply.interfolio.com/33792 with a letter of application explaining your research project and interest in the Center and a description of your teaching experience, CV, and two letters of reference.

“Learning From the West African Ebola Epidemic” is a one-day conference in New York City exploring the hypothesis that building public trust in effective organizations is essential for fighting health crises such as Ebola. The conference is grounded in the Global Health Security Agenda that seeks to accelerate progress towards a world safe from infectious disease.

About the Film: A brand new documentary about one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century. The German-Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt caused an uproar in the 1960s by coining the subversive concept of the “Banality of Evil” when referring to the trial of Adolph Eichmann, which she covered for the New Yorker magazine. Her private life was no less controversial thanks to her early love affair with the renowned German philosopher and Nazi supporter Martin Heidegger. This thought provoking and spirited documentary, with its abundance of archival materials, offers an intimate portrait of the whole of Arendt’s life, traveling to places where she lived, worked, loved, and was betrayed, as she wrote about the open wounds of modern times. Through her books, which are still widely read and the recent release of Margarethe von Trotta’s biopic Hannah Arendt (also a Zeitgeist Films release) there is renewed interest in Arendt throughout the world, especially among young people who find her insights into the nature of evil, totalitarianism, ideologies, and the perils faced by refugees, more relevant than ever. Watch the Trailer.

Wednesday, April 8, 2016

Film Forum, 209 West Houston Street West of 6th Ave., New York, NY, Time TBA

This week on the blog, Hans Teerds discusses how action and interaction both relate to the public space but how they differ significantly in where and how they occur in the world in the Quote of the Week. Horace reflects on how we can all live life to its fullest in this week’s Thoughts on Thinking. Finally, we realize the types of affairs conducted in the intimate kitchens of communist systems in this week’s Library feature.

Hannah Arendt considered calling her magnum opus Amor Mundi: Love of the World. Instead, she settled upon The Human Condition. What is most difficult, Arendt writes, is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it. And yet she came to do just that. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection. Above all it means the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.

Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.

In an essay loosely imagined as a review of of Richard Tuck’s new book The Sleeping Sovereign, Jedediah Purdy argues that the American Constitution deserves its special reverence. “The genius of a constitution was that it gave the whole citizenry a way of making its own law: not by constantly engaging in self-government through assemblies or parliaments, but by occasionally mobilizing, through special institutions such as conventions and plebiscites, to authorize the fundamental law of their polities. A constitution was the law that the people authorized, directly rather than through their representatives. This power to make fundamental law was called sovereignty, and a democracy was a political community where sovereignty lay with the citizens. By contrast, the ordinary laws that legislatures passed were simply government, the apparatus that carried out sovereign decisions. Government, as Rousseau wrote, mediates between the sovereign, which makes the law, and the people, who live under it. In a democracy, government mediates between two aspects of the people: as democratic sovereign lawmakers, and as everyday law-abiders. Less mystically, government is what the mobilized people sets up to keep order after the sovereign citizens disperse to their private lives. A constitution, Tuck argues, was an answer to a problem that had long been thought insoluble: how could democracy possibly be revived in the modern world? What difference does this make? Some contrasts are helpful. In this way of thinking, the distinctive thing about a constitution, its special interest and force, is not in the structure of government that it sets up, but in the theory of sovereignty that underlies it. It is true that the US Constitution has the democracy-baffling ‘republican’ features that clog and divert political decisions, such as the divided Congress, the unrepresentative Senate, and the presidential veto. But these checks and balances were intended originally to keep the government from usurping the powers of the sovereign but dispersed people, according to whose collective will it was originally established.” Purdy and Tuck argue that while it includes anti-democratic elements like the Supreme Court and limitations on majority rule, the American Constitution is fundamentally democratic not least because it was approved by the people and can–at times–be revised by the people. The Constitution is both an act of the people and a way for the people to protect themselves from the very democratic government they establish. Tuck and Purdy call this Constitutional power sovereignty.

Hannah Arendt, who had a similar view of the democratic importance of the U.S. Constitution, saw that the Constitution’s fundamental democratic role rests with its emergence in opposition to sovereignty. She writes: “In this respect, the great and, in the long run, perhaps the greatest American innovation in politics as such was the consistent abolition of sovereignty within the body politic of the republic, the insight that in the realm of human affairs sovereignty and tyranny are the same. The defect of the Confederacy was that there had been no ‘partition of power between the General and the Local Governments’; and that it had acted as the central agency of an alliance rather than as a government; experience had shown that in tis alliance of powers there was a dangerous tendency for the allied powers not to act as checks upon one another but to cancel one another out, that is, to breed impotence. What the founders were afraid of in practice was not power but impotence, and their fears were intensified by the view of Montesquieu, quoted throughout these discussions, that republican government was effective only in relatively small territories.” The American Constitution succeeds, at least initially in Arendt’s telling, in part because it establishes multiple and overlapping power centers–the Federal government, state governments, local governments, and non-governmental civic organizations–all of which mobilize democratic citizens to govern themselves when necessary. It is because there is no single sovereign source under the American Constitution that the democratic power of the people is protected. By the 1960s, Arendt worried that this pluralization and dispersal of power at the foundation of the American Constitution had eroded; as power has increasingly been centralized under single and increasingly sovereign national government, the American “Revolutionary spirit”–what Arendt calls the “new American experience of power”–has waned. It may be that the people are simply sleeping and might awake, as Purdy and Tuck appear to hope. But one lasting effect of the nationalization of power is that most American citizens have little or no experience in self-government aside from voting. The temptation in such a situation is not self-government, which is time-consuming and messy, but the election of a demagogue who promises to deliver what we want. The question is how the sleeping sovereign can be awoken while still protecting and strengthening our democratic constitutional traditions.–RB

Earlier this week, I went to see Guy Maddin’s 2003 film The Saddest Music in The World, in which contestants from countries all around the world compete to win a $25,000 prize for playing, well, the saddest music in the world, as judged by a Canadian beer magnate. Set in the Depression, and filmed as if it were actually from that period, the film satirizes the way that sadness can be evoked through kitsch and a little “razzle dazzle,” even as it also takes aim at those who seek out suffering in far flung parts of the world and take it for granted that suffering must live in places outside of the West. At the heart of Maddin’s movie is the idea that sadness is incommensurate and that it can’t be transmitted, least of all through music. In the New York Times, Ben Ratliff suggests that what we’re hearing isn’t sadness at all: “We do a lot of extra work in our listening around the notion of sadness–a phantom quality in listening that most of us nonetheless recognize and agree on–and through our extra work, we become especially vested in the music. The extra work takes the form of myths that we build around the reasons and circumstances of a recording, and through that myth-building we temporarily disbelieve in artifice. Artifice is the practice and process of being something one is not, and it is used to small or large degree by every artist in the world. It’s as transcendent as truth. But sadness portrayed in music, whether the zombified reserve of some English bohemian folk singers during the 1960s–Nick Drake, Jacqui McShee, Vashti Bunyan–or a sustained low note on a cello, is Lethe water: You recognize the symbol, drink it as you listen, and you forget all possible practical circumstances around the sadness you think you’re hearing. These can be the musician’s desire to connect with the tradition and audience of an earlier musician, and thereby to have his work accepted more quickly and earn some money; a producer’s desire to add emotional variety to an artist’s work; a singer’s decision to use a different part of his voice or capture it differently through microphones; or a fully contrived aesthetic absolutism equating misery, integrity and obscurity–the Romantic era’s interest-bearing gift to the future. On the listener’s end, the circumstances adding up to a ‘sad’ listening experience can be practical and not sad at all: the need for a focused and isolated stretch of time that is all his; the need for a bracing effect in order to focus while doing something boring, like being in transit; or the need to re-enact the emotions around something awful, which paradoxically makes you feel alive–a death, a breakup, a rejection, a failure… What is sadness in sound per se? Nothing. It doesn’t exist. There is no note or kind of note that in and of itself is sad and only sad. (Heard differently, Drake’s voice can also be relaxed, or tired, or content.) But the construct of sadness, and the attendant contract that it helps build between musician and listener, has to do with how we might recognize it person-to-person: through silence and dissonant long tones, or through agitation and mania; through closed systems of harmony or phrasing, or through unnervingly open and dark ones. We hear it through voices and through instruments. And as listeners agree to play by the official rules of sadness, so do most musicians, and so do most singers, imitating the sound of instruments.” Ratliff, I think, takes it a step too far. Even if artful sadness is manufactured, it still creates a real effect in those who hear it, generating or articulating something which is felt within which, in turn, might (or might not) create a community of people who feel the same way, if never for exactly the same reasons. The question, then, is not whether sadness in art is real. Instead, it’s something like “what does it mean to share the unsharable”? Is empathy always empty, the ethical facade for what is essentially entertainment for the more fortunate? Or can it catalyze love of the world?–JK

Benedict Anderson, a famed scholar of Indonesia who wrote the much-taught book Imagined Communities, died last month. In a posthumously published essay, he tells the tale of his intellectual development: “The 35 years I spent as a professor of government at Cornell taught me two interesting lessons about US academia. The first was that theory, mirroring the style of late capitalism, has obsolescence built into it, in the manner of high-end commodities. In year X students had to read and more or less revere Theory Y, while sharpening their teeth on passé Theory W. Not too many years later, they were told to sharpen their teeth on passé Theory Y, admire Theory Z, and forget about Theory W. The second lesson was that–with some important exceptions like the work of Barrington Moore, Jr–the extension of political science to comparative politics tended to proceed, consciously or unconsciously, on the basis of the US example: one measured how far other countries were progressing in approximating America’s liberty, respect for law, economic development, democracy etc. Hence the rapid rise, and equally rapid fall, of an approach that today looks pretty dead–modernisation theory. Needless to say, there was often an openly stated Cold War objective behind this kind of theory. Namely, to prove that Marxism was fundamentally wrong. In its innocence, this kind of ‘look at me’ theory typically ignored such embarrassing things as the very high murder rate in the US, its hugely disproportionate black prison population, persistent illiteracy and significant levels of political corruption. Even so, there is no doubt in my mind that my experience as a graduate student unconsciously prepared me for later comparative work. My duties as a teaching assistant in American politics and (European) comparative politics obliged me to study a great many texts that I would not otherwise have read. The undergraduates in those days were 90 per cent American and knew very little about Europe. To help them, I found it useful to make constant comparisons between the US, the UK, France and Germany. I myself took graduate courses on the Soviet Union, Asia, the US and Western Europe. Finally, the format of the Southeast Asia programme forced me not only to start thinking across the region in a comparative sense, but also to read across disciplines, especially anthropology, history and economics. It was all fun because it was so new to me. My gradual introduction to comparative thinking, however, was quite bookish and ‘intellectual’ until I went to Indonesia. There, for the first time, my emotional and political leanings came into play in my work. Yet the main effect was not to make me think more theoretically in any general sense. Rather I found myself becoming a kind of Indonesian (or Indonesian-Javanese) nationalist, and feeling annoyed when I ran into bullying American officials who clearly looked down on Indonesians, had no time for Sukarno and were anti-communist, to the point that when Sukarno angrily uttered his famous anti-American phrase, ‘To hell with your aid!’, I felt like cheering.”

Corey Robin profiles the ‘public intellectual,’ that mix between a celebrity and a scholar: “The public intellectual is not simply interested in a wide audience of readers, in shopping her ideas on the op-ed page to sell more books. She’s not looking for markets or hungry for a brand. She’s not an explainer or a popularizer. She is instead the literary equivalent of the epic political actor, who sees her writing as a transformative mode of action, a thought-deed in the world. The transformation she seeks may be a far-reaching change of policy, an education of manners and morals, or a renovation of the human estate. Her watch may be wound for tomorrow or today. But whatever her aim or time frame, the public intellectual wants her writing to have an effect, to have all the power of power itself. To have that effect, however, she must be attuned to the sensitivities of her audience. Not because she wishes to massage or assuage them but because she wants to tear them apart. Her aim is to turn her readers from what they are into what they are not, to alienate her readers from themselves. The public intellectual I have in mind is not indifferent to her readers; her project is not complete without them. But there’s a thin line separating her needing readers from her being needy of and for readers. And it is on that thin line–that tension wire between thinker and actor, intellectual and celebrity–that she must stand and balance herself. ‘I want to make 200 million people change their minds,’ said Gore Vidal, a writer who, not coincidentally, stretched that wire to its breaking point. Though the public intellectual is a political actor, a performer on stage, what differentiates her from the celebrity or publicity hound is that she is writing for an audience that does not yet exist. Unlike the ordinary journalist or enterprising scholar, she is writing for a reader she hopes to bring into being. She never speaks to the reader as he is; she speaks to the reader as he might be. Her common reader is an uncommon reader.”

Mimi Howard considers Friedrich Nietzsche’s “On the Future of Our Educational Institutions,” which has been re-translated, re-published, and re-titled Anti-Education. “Like the screw-maker, who becomes virtuosic in executing his only task, the scholar’s total separation from all other fields is held up as evidence of his genius. The total remoteness of his work is ‘a badge of honor, a sign of noble moderation.’ Likewise, the philosopher’s student is eminently concerned with this narrowing of scholarship against the background of greater democratization. In a turn of phrase that Nietzsche uses once more at the end of his last lecture, calling it the ‘thesis’ of his argument, he says: It seems to me we need to distinguish between two dominant tendencies in our educational institutions, apparently opposed but equally ruinous in effect and eventually converging in their end results. The first is the drive for the greatest possible expansion and dissemination of education; the other is the drive for the narrowing and weakening of education. He later adds that this phenomenon has allowed scholarship to be eclipsed by journalism. ‘It is in journalism that the two tendencies converge,’ he says. ‘The daily newspaper has effectively replaced education, and anyone who still lays claim to culture or education, even a scholar, typically relies on a sticky layer of journalism.’ Gravitation toward journalism and other popular forms of critique was wrapped up in a forgetting of classical education. This forgetting begins with the curriculum at the gymnasium, which instructs its students to prematurely cultivate their personalities by writing indulgent personal essays, among other worthless exercises, and ends with the mindless vocational training that goes on in university. And even though both the gymnasium and the university claim to appreciate the classics, a true classical model would involve something to which they have not yet committed, namely, a serious consideration of language. ‘In sum,’ the old philosopher says, ‘the gymnasium has neglected and still neglects the one place where true education begins, and the readiest subject to hand: the mother tongue.’ Disciplined mastery of German is, for the philosopher, the only way that a pupil can begin to formulate true critique. Once he understands how difficult language is, how slippery and misguiding, only then will he ‘feel physical disgust for the “refined diction” of our literati and the “elegance” of style so beloved and praised in our novelists and mass-producers of journalism.’ At first this whiff of snobbery seems reasonable enough. But it soon takes on an intensely elitist, if not vehemently oligarchic, bent. Education is necessary only insofar as it allows a society to recognize its own, very select number of geniuses. It is a mistake, the older philosopher says, to think that education can produce a large amount of exceptional individuals. In reality, it produces very few. But it is the responsibility of the cultured and educated to keep one’s eye out for these truly remarkable individuals, and to nurture them when they emerge. ‘The genius is not actually born of culture, or education: His origin is, as it were, metaphysical,’ the philosopher says. ‘But for him to appear, to emerge from a people […] all of this the genius can only do if he has been ripened in the womb and nourished in the lap of his people’s culture.’ It appears the purpose of the institution is not simply to keep afloat amid a sea of deceptive drudgery, but also something more essential, and more authoritarian.”

David Frum in The Atlantic looks into the origins of the Trump phenomena and finds a class divide within the Republican Party. “The mutiny of the 2016 election cycle has been different. By the fall of 2015, a majority of Republicans favored candidates who had never been elected to anything: Donald Trump, Ben Carson, and Carly Fiorina. Fiorina’s campaign was perhaps not so unusual. A former CEO, she appealed to the same business-minded Republicans who might have voted for Romney in 2012. Carson appealed to the same religious conservatives that candidates like Mike Huckabee and Santorum had appealed to in prior presidential cycles. What was new and astonishing was the Trump boom. He jettisoned party orthodoxy on issues ranging from entitlement spending to foreign policy. He scoffed at trade agreements. He said rude things about Sheldon Adelson and the Koch brothers. He reviled the campaign contributions of big donors–himself included!–as open and blatant favor-buying. Trump’s surge was a decisive repudiation by millions of Republican voters of the collective wisdom of their party elite. When Trump first erupted into the Republican race in June, he did so with a message of grim pessimism. ‘We got $18 trillion in debt. We got nothing but problems … We’re dying. We’re dying. We need money … We have losers. We have people that don’t have it. We have people that are morally corrupt. We have people that are selling this country down the drain … The American dream is dead.’ That message did not resonate with those who’d ridden the S&P 500 from less than 900 in 2009 to more than 2,000 in 2015. But it found an audience all the same. Half of Trump’s supporters within the GOP had stopped their education at or before high-school graduation, according to the polling firm YouGov. Only 19 percent had a college or postcollege degree. Thirty-eight percent earned less than $50,000. Only 11 percent earned more than $100,000. Trump Republicans were not ideologically militant. Just 13 percent said they were very conservative; 19 percent described themselves as moderate. Nor were they highly religious by Republican standards. What set them apart from other Republicans was their economic insecurity and the intensity of their economic nationalism. Sixty-three percent of Trump supporters wished to end birthright citizenship for the children of illegal immigrants born on U.S. soil–a dozen points higher than the norm for all Republicans. More than other Republicans, Trump supporters distrusted Barack Obama as alien and dangerous: Only 21 percent acknowledged that the president was born in the United States, according to an August survey by the Democratic-oriented polling firm PPP. Sixty-six percent believed the president was a Muslim. Trump promised to protect these voters’ pensions from their own party’s austerity. ‘We’ve got Social Security that’s going to be destroyed if somebody like me doesn’t bring money into the country. All these other people want to cut the hell out of it. I’m not going to cut it at all; I’m going to bring money in, and we’re going to save it.’ He promised to protect their children from being drawn into another war in the Middle East, this time in Syria. ‘If we’re going to have World War III,’ he told The Washington Post in October, ‘it’s not going to be over Syria.’ As for the politicians threatening to shoot down the Russian jets flying missions in Syria, ‘I won’t even call them hawks. I call them the fools.’ He promised a campaign independent of the influences of money that had swayed so many Republican races of the past. ‘I will tell you that our system is broken. I gave to many people. Before this, before two months ago, I was a businessman. I give to everybody. When they call, I give. And you know what? When I need something from them, two years later, three years later, I call them. They are there for me. And that’s a broken system.’ He promised above all to protect their wages from being undercut by Republican immigration policy.”

Sunita Puri, a doctor of palliative medicine, is attentive to the economic and social inequalities she witnesses when making house calls to patients dying at home. “I think ahead to my next visit in Baldwin Village with Janice, a woman in her 60s with advanced breast cancer. Because she is estranged from her children and sisters, her landlady and two friends from church take turns caring for her. ‘Just list Jesus Christ as my emergency contact,’ she snapped at me once. ‘You can’t trust nobody, especially not family.’ After Janice, I will see Joseph, a veteran in his early 50s whose lung cancer has spread to his bones. Even though he needs opiates to control the extreme pain his cancer causes when he tries to walk, he refuses to fill the prescription because he is afraid of being robbed and harmed if ‘the youngsters find out I have that stuff in my house.’ I will then visit 56-year-old Jorge, who has Lou Gehrig’s disease. On my last visit, I found him alone at home, unable to reach for his medication for shortness of breath. He explained that his wife was returning from working an extra shift to make up for the income he could no longer provide. In three days, she will have enough money to pay for help, he reassured me and our team social worker. I constantly wonder whether, given these life circumstances, my patients fully benefit from the care my team and I try to provide. Aside from assessing symptoms and providing medications to ease them, perhaps just treating what I can with compassion is the best I can do for them. Still, I try to find some meaning in these visits, in the visits that preceded them, in all the visits that await, so that I can get up tomorrow and do this imperfect work again. My patients offer a vivid lesson in accepting inexplicable circumstances and choosing to live the best they can. I witness their hard-won wisdom and dignity and strength–and I know that these, too, are not things hospice can provide. Wisdom and dignity and strength have nothing to do with social or economic status or one’s neighborhood. Yet they are perhaps the most essential components to the very private, internal process of making peace with life as part of the process of dying.”

In a month when we’ve been discussing China’s heavy hand in silencing dissent (or perceived dissent) from state policy in both Hong Kong and Taiwan, Tsering Woeser draws our attention to another area of contested political power. Why, he asks, are Tibetans setting themselves on fire?: “February 27, 2009, was the third day of Losar, the Tibetan New Year. It was also the day that self-immolation came to Tibet. The authorities had just cancelled a Great Prayer Festival (Monlam) that was supposed to commemorate the victims of the government crackdown in 2008. A monk by the name of Tapey stepped out of the Kirti Monastery and set his body alight on the streets of Ngawa, in the region known in Tibetan as Amdo, a place of great religious reverence and relevance, now designated as part of China’s Sichuan Province. At least 145 other Tibetans have self-immolated since then. Of these, 141 did so within Tibet, while the remaining five were living in exile. According to the best information we have, 125 have died (including 122 within Tibet and three abroad). Most of these individuals are men, though some are women. Many were parents who left behind young children. The oldest was sixty-four, and the youngest was sixteen. Seven underage Tibetans have either self-immolated or attempted self-immolation; two of them died, and two were detained and their fate is unknown. The numbers include three monks of high rank (tulkus, or reincarnated masters), along with thirty-nine ordinary monks and eight nuns. But many were ordinary people: seventy-four were nomads or peasants; among the others were high school students, workers, vendors, a carpenter, a woodworker, a writer, a tangka painter, a taxi driver, a retired government cadre, a laundry owner, a park ranger, and three activists exiled abroad. All are Tibetan… In my interviews with international media on the topic of self-immolation, I have always tried to emphasize one area of frequent misunderstanding: self-immolation is not suicide, and it is not a gesture of despair. Rather, it is sacrifice for a greater cause, and an attempt to press for change, as can be seen in these two peaks in self-immolation. Such an act is not to be judged by the precepts of Buddhism: it can only be judged by its political results. Each and every one of these roaring flames on the Tibetan plateau has been ignited by ethnic oppression. Each is a torch casting light on a land trapped in darkness. These names are a continuation of the protests of 2008 and a continuation of the monks’ decision that March: ‘We must stand up!’ Attempts to label these acts as suicide–or even, curiously, as a forbidden act of ‘killing’–are either a complete misinterpretation of the phenomenon or, more likely, the type of deliberate misrepresentation that we see all too often in Chinese state propaganda. A high-ranking monk once confided in me very clearly: ‘The cases of self-immolation in Tibet absolutely do not violate our Buddhist teachings on killing. They are not in any way opposed to Dharma, and certainly do not violate it. The motivations of self-immolators in Tibet, whether monks or laypeople, have nothing at all to do with personal interest…. These acts are meant to protect the Dharma and to win the Tibetan people’s rights to freedom and democracy.’ Self-immolators are bodhisattvas sacrificing the self for others, phoenixes reincarnated from the flames of death.”

How better to celebrate Martin Luther King Jr. day? In the Boston Globe, Jill Terreri Ramos reports about the discovery at Amherst College of a speech by Martin Luther King Jr. “The result is a clear recording of King’s deliberate delivery of ‘The Summer of Our Discontent,’ in which he offers reasons for civil rights activism during the summer of 1963. The speech was delivered at the New School in New York City on Feb. 6, 1964, and was broadcast by the student radio station at Amherst College on Dec. 8, 1964. During the hour-long recording, King talks about low incomes in black communities, inequities in public schools, and the failure of political leaders to act on civil rights. The similarities between King’s themes and modern events are not lost on Leavitt and her colleagues.”

Jazz, as the modern art form that lays claim to improvisation, situates music in a productive tension between individual freedom and a mysterious yet sentient order. As do modern theories of liberalism in politics, Jazz insists both on the individual liberty of each that is through fidelity to common truths, recognition of traditional customs, or embrace of collective ends is rendered compatible with a larger inter-subjective order. Freedom as an art of improvisation means that men are free only insofar as they act in ways that are both free and constrained. This is very much what Hannah Arendt means means when she writes that “Men are free-as distinguished from their possessing the gift of freedom- as long as they act, neither before nor after; for to be free and to act are the same.” In this evening on “A Taste for Chaos: The Hidden Order in the Art of Improvisation,” we bring together leading thinkers and musicians to explore the nature of improvisation and the art of freedom.

Sheldon S. Wolin (August 4, 1922 – October 21, 2015) was one of the most important American political theorists of the 20th century. Wolin authored critical works such as Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought, Hobbes and the Epic Tradition of Political Theory, Presence of the Past: Essays on State and the Constitution, Tocqueville Between Two Worlds: The Making of a Political and Theoretical Life, and Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism. Professor of Politics, Emeritus, at Princeton University, Wolin was the founding editor of the influential journal democracy (1981-1983), with the help Nicholas Xenos. In memory of Wolin, we discuss the work of political theory with Nicholas Xenos.

Jana V. Schmidt’s research pertains to questions of literature and art, their status vis-à-vis the political and the social, image theory, mimesis, and the representation of intersubjectivity. Her main focus as a literary scholar is on twentieth century German and American literature, literary theory (including “continental” philosophy and critical theory), and literature’s relation to violence. One nodal point for these inquiries has been the problem of reconciliation in the aftermath of the Holocaust. How to constitute a “world” after 1945 and how to integrate the victims’ memories into such world-making are crucial questions for her work. Hannah Arendt’s thought on conciliation, her literary writings, and her notion of world have shaped her answers to these questions in her dissertation, “An Aesthetics of Reconciliation – Intersubjectivity after the End of Community, 1945-1970.” Jana’s next project will investigate the figure of the survivor in postwar American literature and public Holocaust discourses. Other interests include Jewish studies, psychoanalysis, phenomenology, memory and memorialization, and the study of exile. An essay on the American painter Philip Guston and Jean-François Lyotard’s notion of the figure is forthcoming with Bloomsbury. Jana holds an MA in English from the University of Pennsylvania and a PhD in Comparative Literature from the State University of New York at Buffalo. She is looking forward to teaching the First Year Seminar at Bard.

The Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College announces two post-doctoral fellowships for the 2016-2017 academic year. The fellows should have a Ph.D. in political theory, philosophy, or a related field in the humanities, and his or her work should intersect meaningfully with Hannah Arendt’s thinking. In residence at the Arendt Center, the fellow will pursue his or her independent research at the Center, which includes Hannah Arendt’s personal library. The fellow will have access to Arendt’s Digital Archive through a relationship with the Arendt Center in New York City. In addition, the fellow will have the opportunity to participate in seminars, conferences, lectures, colloquia, and workshops organized by the Center.

To apply for the fellowship, please apply through Interfolio.com at: http://apply.interfolio.com/33792 with a letter of application explaining your research project and interest in the Center and a description of your teaching experience, CV, and two letters of reference.

“Learning From the West African Ebola Epidemic” is a one-day conference in New York City exploring the hypothesis that building public trust in effective organizations is essential for fighting health crises such as Ebola. The conference is grounded in the Global Health Security Agenda that seeks to accelerate progress towards a world safe from infectious disease.

About the Film: A brand new documentary about one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century. The German-Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt caused an uproar in the 1960s by coining the subversive concept of the “Banality of Evil” when referring to the trial of Adolph Eichmann, which she covered for the New Yorker magazine. Her private life was no less controversial thanks to her early love affair with the renowned German philosopher and Nazi supporter Martin Heidegger. This thought provoking and spirited documentary, with its abundance of archival materials, offers an intimate portrait of the whole of Arendt’s life, traveling to places where she lived, worked, loved, and was betrayed, as she wrote about the open wounds of modern times. Through her books, which are still widely read and the recent release of Margarethe von Trotta’s biopic Hannah Arendt (also a Zeitgeist Films release) there is renewed interest in Arendt throughout the world, especially among young people who find her insights into the nature of evil, totalitarianism, ideologies, and the perils faced by refugees, more relevant than ever. Watch the Trailer.

Wednesday, April 8, 2016

Film Forum, 209 West Houston Street West of 6th Ave., New York, NY, Time TBA

This week on the Blog, Kazue Koishikawa discusses how identifying freedom with free will has brought the “most dangerous consequence” by allowing us to claim freedom at the price of all others’ sovereignty in the Quote of the Week. Alan Rickman reflects on the human need for storytelling and considering what’s possible in this week’s Thoughts on Thinking. Roger Berkowitz, the Academic Director of the Hannah Arendt Center, announces that he is looking to hire a Part Time Research Assistant to assist with a book project. Finally, we appreciate the annotations Hannah Arendt made to her copy of Jules Monnerot’s Sociology and Psychology of Communism in this week’s Library feature.

Hannah Arendt made several annotations to her copy of this book. For instance, on page 162 (see left), she affixed an “X” and two vertical lines in the margins adjacent to the following passage:

“Secular religion of the Islamic type–the virulent conjunction of a religion and a people each of which is ‘new’ and at the disposal of the other and each of which transforms the other–affords a vital outlet.”

Later, on page 225 (at right), she places two vertical lines next to a section that reads:

“Twentieth-century absolutism, therefore, differs from the ancient forms of tyranny as realisation differs from intention, so greatly do the means at its disposal increase its power of territorial expansion and its psychological intensity.”

Want to share pictures of your own Arendt library?

Please send them to David Bisson, our Media Coordinator, at dbisson@bard.edu, and we will feature them on our blog!

The Hannah Arendt Collection at Bard College is maintained by staff members at the Bard College Stevenson Library. To peruse the collection’s digital entries, please click here.

Hannah Arendt considered calling her magnum opus Amor Mundi: Love of the World. Instead, she settled upon The Human Condition. What is most difficult, Arendt writes, is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it. And yet she came to do just that. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection. Above all it means the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.

Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.

Elizabeth Drew argues in the NYRB that the successes thus far of Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, and Bernie Sanders are evidence of a revolutionary moment in American politics. “A revolution is taking place in our presidential campaign. Though no one has voted yet and the polls–especially nationwide ones–shouldn’t be taken too literally, there’s every indication in both parties that what’s termed the political establishment is being rejected. We’re some distance from the end of the nomination contests, though perhaps not in the Republican race: if Donald Trump were to sweep Iowa and New Hampshire it’s hard to see how he can be stopped. So far, the talk of a savior entering the race is only that, and to make such a challenge would be daunting. Those who’ve ventured to predict the outcome and gone by past patterns haven’t had it right. Politically, this country is in a new place. It’s best to ignore suggestions of historic parallels. As of now, the anti-establishment candidates in both parties–Trump and Ted Cruz for the Republicans, and Bernie Sanders for the Democrats–are either well ahead of or giving close chase to the rest of their respective fields. That shouldn’t be a surprise. The public mood has been building toward this situation. Leaders in both parties are seen as having failed various tests and are being rejected. The complaints against the status quo are similar among Democratic and Republican voters. In fact, so alike is the dissatisfaction that there are indications of a possible large crossover vote; in a recent survey, nearly 20 percent of Democratic voters say they would vote for Trump in a general election. Some of the complaints are familiar, but a striking one is new. The most familiar–and bipartisan–grievances are that the middle class has been squeezed; that wages haven’t kept up; that the divide between the very rich and poor continues to grow. These are deeply felt issues, despite the fact that, in recent months jobs have been coming back and unemployment, at just 5 percent (among those who’ve remained in the job market), is half of what it was when Obama took office, an achievement that virtually no one expected. A sleeper issue, however, has also finally come to the fore: the corruption that infects our political system. It had long been said that the public doesn’t care about this matter, but upset over the gradual loss of control of our political system to those who can buy it is now palpable. For very different reasons, both Trump and Bernie Sanders are seen as incorruptible.”

Drew is right. Trump, Cruz, and Sanders are succeeding not only because of their policies but at least in part because they are perceived by their followers as authentic and incorruptible. Trump is famously vague about policy, simply asserting he and American will win. Sanders, while more politically practiced and less reality-challenged than Trump, too has lean policy prescriptions. Sanders promises that he is mobilizing a movement that will break through decades of gridlock and remake the nation. As do Trump and Cruz, Sanders places great importance on his ability to inspire and lead a mass mobilization. The seduction of Sanders, Trump, and Cruz is that they actually believe what they say, that they do want to mobilize a wave of supporters who will weed out the crooks and revitalize the American dream. There is a real possibility that for the first time in my political life, we might have a presidential election between major-party candidates who actually speak from conviction. That is something new, possibly revolutionary.

On another level, however, Drew is too quick to baptize our present moment with revolutionary credentials. Our representative institutions have been corrupted. There is anger and frustration on the left and the right. But what is the answer? Trump channels anger against immigrants, minorities, and even Wall Street. Sanders channels anger against Wall Street but also against the political and business establishments, not to mention what he calls the “billionaire class.” What Trump, Cruz, and Sanders offer is an ideological politics perfectly calibrated to our angry era. There is some chance Trump, Cruz, or Sanders will be our next president. If one of them wins, there will be joyful redemption on one side and resentful anger on the other. Trump and Sanders know that the legitimacy of our American institutions is compromised. They have mobilized masses with populist messages. They are not wrong. This is a first step toward real change.

What is missing, however, is what Hannah Arendt once referred to as a “real analysis of the existing situation,” a recognition of the uniqueness of our current situation and a new way forward. The candidates can’t be faulted for the fact that they don’t have solutions. Nobody seems to. But a politics of anger rarely blooms into a rose. A revolutionary situation, Arendt writes, “need not lead to revolution. For one thing, it can end in counterrevolution, the establishment of dictatorships, it can end in total anticlimax; it need not lead to anything.” With the candidacies of Trump, Cruz, and Sanders, justifiable anger is raising the stakes in a dangerous game. Which is why Drew rightly concludes her essay with a warning: “The anger, fear, resentment, racism, and frustration that are playing into the current political climate make for a turbulent situation. This is a situation prone to undermining our democratic system. It’s not an overstatement to say that in this political climate this election encourages a certain fascist strain. We’re not there yet and our democratic impulses are strong. The disturbing thing is that that fascist tendency can even be glimpsed.”–RB

Jessica Bennett reports about how students and college campuses are trying to fix the problem of sexual assaults on campus by changing how they educate about what consent is–a task which is harder even than it sounds: “Campuses like Trinity’s have thick handbooks full of sexual assault resources, filled with pages upon pages of legal definitions and situational scenarios. But that doesn’t mean that students necessarily understand the new policies. Yes, ‘consent’ is now emblazoned on T-shirts and posters–it was the subject of a recent public service initiative at Columbia, ‘Consent is BAE,’ that was criticized by students–but even that does not ensure that students can define it. ‘I think it’s when two people agree to have sex, yeah?’ a young woman, a junior at the Fashion Institute of Technology, said when approached on a recent day in Manhattan and asked if she could define ‘affirmative consent.’ ‘Isn’t that when only yes means yes? But not really?’ said another woman, a dance and fashion major at N.Y.U. ‘I know what consent is; is this different?’ said a young man, a sports management major, also at N.Y.U. And there is a whole new vocabulary to memorize, with terms like ‘enthusiastic consent,’ ‘implied consent,’ ‘spectrum of consent,’ ‘reluctant permission,’ ‘coercion’ and ‘unintentional rape.’ Even ‘yes means yes,’ the slogan of the anti-rape movement is sort of confusing. ‘It should be “Only yes means yes,”‘ said Dr. Brod, the sociologist. (And if you still can’t tell, then ask.)” As any first year law student knows, consent is one of the trickiest concepts in our moral universe. Can silence signal consent? Can actions or behavior mean consent? When is consent rescinded? What is knowing versus impaired consent? Can one consent to be enslaved? Is it permissible to consent to be violated? The effort to make sex consensual is laudable. But the demand for consent is hardly a silver bullet that will prevent unwanted and non-consensual sex. This is above all the case because so often we, and especially young people, don’t know for sure what we want.–RB

Michael Massing has published a two-part story in the NYRB calling for a new form of journalism dedicated to covering the business, philanthropic, and political activities of the 1%. “Even amid the outpouring of coverage of rising income inequality, however, the richest Americans have remained largely hidden from view. On all sides, billionaires are shaping policy, influencing opinion, promoting favorite causes, polishing their images–and carefully shielding themselves from scrutiny. Journalists have largely let them get away with it. News organizations need to find new ways to lift the veil off the superrich and lay bare their power and influence. Digital technology, with its flexibility, speed, boundless capacity, and ease of interactivity, seems ideally suited to this task, but only if it’s used more creatively than it has been to date.” Massing offers a number of preliminary examples of what he has in mind. One concerns Paul Singer, CEO of the hedge fund Elliott Management. “Looking more closely at these individuals, I became fascinated with Singer. He seems to typify the ability of today’s ultrarich to amass tremendous power while remaining out of the limelight. Singer did receive a flurry of attention in late October when news broke of his decision to back Marco Rubio’s presidential bid, but it quickly faded, and he moved back into the shadows. Going online, I found out (from Forbes) that Singer is worth about $2 billion. He is the single largest donor to the Republican Party, with his money going overwhelmingly to candidates who support free enterprise and oppose regulation. (A major exception is his support for groups promoting gay rights and same-sex marriage; his son is gay.) From the Times I learned that the fund-raisers Singer hosts in his apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side can net more than $1 million a session, and I read in The Wall Street Journal that he was instrumental in the selection of Paul Ryan as Mitt Romney’s running mate in 2012. In a detailed profile of Singer in Mother Jones, Peter Stone noted that Elliott Management has frequently been called a ‘”vulture fund” because a chunk of its profits comes from buying distressed companies’ or countries’ debt at a steep discount.’ In 2012 a subsidiary of the firm, seeking to extract full payment from Argentina for some bonds on which it had defaulted, had an Argentine naval vessel impounded in a Ghanaian port. In 2004, Singer contributed $5,000 to Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, which attacked John Kerry’s war record, badly damaging his presidential bid. Since then, he has given generously to American Crossroads and the Club for Growth, an anti-tax group that has backed many Tea Party candidates. Singer’s influence, though, extends far beyond that. He is chairman of the board of the Manhattan Institute, a member of the board of Commentary magazine, and a major donor to the American Enterprise Institute. He has given to and/or sat on the boards of several organizations dedicated to a strong Israel, including the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs; the Republican Jewish Coalition; the American Israel Education Foundation, an affiliate of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee that sponsors trips to Israel by members of Congress; and the Israel Project, a group dedicated to boosting Israel’s image. From 2008 to 2011, Singer gave $3.6 million to the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, which has worked tirelessly to isolate and sanction Iran. All of these groups were active in the campaign to kill the nuclear deal with Iran. As I examined their interlocking boards and overlapping missions, I became aware of the enormous political, financial, and lobbying infrastructure behind that campaign. From Paul Blumenthal at The Huffington Post I learned that four hawkish-on-Israel billionaires–Singer, Sheldon Adelson, Home Depot founder Bernard Marcus, and Seth Klarman, the head of the private investment house Baupost–gave a combined $11.5 million to anti-Iran groups from 2011 through 2013 (while also giving $115 million to Republican Party Super PACs in the 2012 and 2014 elections). A parallel array of groups (led by J Street and the Ploughshares Fund) worked to support the deal, but as Eli Clifton pointed out at LobeLog, the anti-Iran groups opposing it had operating budgets nearly five times as large as those in support. Despite the nonstop coverage of the debate over the nuclear agreement, this network remained largely hidden.”

Paul La Farge believes that we shouldn’t be so worried about what the Internet is doing to reading: “A thousand years later, critics fear that digital technology has put this gift in peril. The Internet’s flood of information, together with the distractions of social media, threaten to overwhelm the interior space of reading, stranding us in what the journalist Nicholas Carr has called ‘the shallows,’ a frenzied flitting from one fact to the next. In Carr’s view, the ‘endless, mesmerizing buzz’ of the Internet imperils our very being: ‘One of the greatest dangers we face,’ he writes, ‘as we automate the work of our minds, as we cede control over the flow of our thoughts and memories to a powerful electronic system, is … a slow erosion of our humanness and our humanity.’ There’s no question that digital technology presents challenges to the reading brain, but, seen from a historical perspective, these look like differences of degree, rather than of kind. To the extent that digital reading represents something new, its potential cuts both ways. Done badly (which is to say, done cynically), the Internet reduces us to mindless clickers, racing numbly to the bottom of a bottomless feed; but done well, it has the potential to expand and augment the very contemplative space that we have prized in ourselves ever since we learned to read without moving our lips… The Internet may cause our minds to wander off, and yet a quick look at the history of books suggests that we have been wandering off all along. When we read, the eye does not progress steadily along the line of text; it alternates between saccades–little jumps–and brief stops, not unlike the movement of the mouse’s cursor across a screen of hypertext. From the invention of papyrus around 3000 B.C., until about 300 A.D., most written documents were scrolls, which had to be rolled up by one hand as they were unrolled by the other: a truly linear presentation. Since then, though, most reading has involved codices, bound books or pamphlets, a major advantage of which (at least compared to the scroll) is that you can jump around in them, from chapter to chapter (the table of contents had been around since roughly the first century B.C.); from text to marginal gloss, and, later, to footnote.”

After being illegal for over 60 years, Mein Kampf may once again be published in Germany. Adam Gopnik wonders whether Mein Kampf remains a dangerous book: “the striking thing about the text as a text is that it is not so much diabolical or sinister as creepy. It is the last book in the world that you would expect a nascent Fascist dictator to write. Most of us–and most politicians in particular, even those who belong to extremist movements–try to draw a reasonably charismatic picture of our histories and ourselves. We want to look appealing. An evil force may emerge and temporarily defeat the narrator, but that force is usually placed against a childhood of a purer folk existence, now defiled. That’s the way most politicians’ campaign memoirs still work, for instance. Hitler, whom we suspect of being an embittered, envious, traumatized loser, presents himself as . . . an embittered, envious, traumatized loser. The weirdness of this is especially evident in the earlier autobiographical chapters. His resentments are ever-present. His father was dense, mean, unforgiving, and opaque. (‘My father forbade me to nourish the slightest hope of ever being allowed to study art. I went one step further and declared that if that was the case I would stop studying altogether. As a result of such “pronouncements,” of course, I drew the short end; the old man began the relentless enforcement of his authority.’) His schoolmates were combative, his schoolmasters unappreciative. The petty rancor and unassuaged disappointments of a resentment-filled life burn on every page, in ways one would think might be more demoralizing than inspiring to potential followers…. ‘Mein Kampf’ is a miserable book, but should it be banned? I could certainly sympathize with any German who would like to see it kept illegitimate; some speech should, in fact, be off-limits. But is it a dangerous book? Does it circulate sinister ideas best kept silent? Putting aside the book’s singularly creepy tone, it contains little argumentation that wasn’t already commonplace in other, still-circulating anti-Semitic and extreme-right literature. Hitler’s character remains bewildering, in the obvious mismatch between the extent of his miserableness and the capacity of his will to power, although perhaps it should not be–many other personal stories suggest that miserable people have the will to power in the greatest intensity. But his themes are part of the inheritance of modernity, ones that he merely adapted with a peculiar, self-pitying edge and then took to their nightmarish conclusion: the glory of war over peace; disgust with the messy bargaining and limited successes of reformist, parliamentary democracy and, with that disgust, contempt for the political class as permanently compromised; the certainty that all military setbacks are the results of civilian sabotage and a lack of will; the faith in a strong man; the love of the exceptional character of one nation above all others; the selection of a helpless group to be hated, who can be blamed for feelings of national humiliation. He didn’t invent these arguments. He adapted them, and then later showed where in the real world they led, if taken to their logical outcome by someone possessed, for a time, of absolute power. Resisting those arguments is still our struggle, and so they are, however unsettling, still worth reading, even in their creepiest form.”

In a previously unpublished essay, Aaron Swartz considers the history of complaints about American education and the way that the testing regime we’ve recently emerged from affected students: “The single-minded goal of maximizing test scores has been a blessing for the textbook market, which forces schools to buy expensive ‘evidence-based curricula’ which has been ‘proven’ to maximize test scores. The packages include not only textbooks and workbooks but also scripts for the teachers to read verbatim–deviating from them hasn’t been proven to raise test scores, and is thus prohibited. The package also comes with trained supervisors who drop in on teachers to make sure they’re actually sticking to the script. The effect on the students is almost heartbreaking. Taught that reading is simply about searching contrived stories for particular ‘text features,’ they learn to hate reading. Taught that answering questions is simply about cycling through the multiple choice answers to find the most plausible ones, they begin to stop thinking altogether and just spout random combinations of test buzzwords whenever they’re asked a question. ‘The joy of finding things out’ is banished from the classroom. Testing is in session.” Swartz stops at high school, but the way that standardized testing teaches students to learn has stunning effects after they’ve graduated and gone away to college. As a graduate student teaching assistant at a major public research institution, I’m always amazed at the kind of questions students ask about their tests: they’re much more concerned with the way the test will be structured and the point breakdown of each section than with the material they need to know to do well on the test, almost as if they believe that all they need to be prepared for the test is to be good at taking tests. If testing were the answer to a problem with education in America, it would almost certainly be the wrong one; in her essay “The Crisis in Education,” Hannah Arendt writes that such a crisis “becomes a disaster only when we respond to it with preformed judgments, that is, with prejudices. Such an attitude not only sharpens the crisis but makes us forfeit the experience of reality and the opportunity for reflection it provides.” From a naive point of view, these tests are designed to address gaps in knowledge (the crisis). But if testing suggests anything, it’s that the answer to the question, in Arendt’s phrasing, “of why Johnny can’t read” isn’t to teach more things and then test them on it. Instead of bemoaning what students don’t know, we should be enticing students to figure out what they don’t know and then give them the writing, research, and critical thinking skills that enable them to go explore on their own, that is, the facility to make their own judgments. Among the myriad ways that American public education fails its students, this one is among the most serious. No test is going to give them the curiosity they need to face the world they were born into.–JK

Ian Storey writes about the twitter hashtag #YouAintNoMuslimBruv, a recorded response from an unidentified bystander to the terrorist attack in London at Leytonstone Station in which two were severely injured in a knife attack by an individual claiming his acts were in the name of “Syria”. The bystander is heard saying, “You ain’t no muslim, bruv. You’re an embarrassment”. Storey writes: “The temptation would be to think that the unidentified bystander is simply denying the attacker his religiousness. Certainly, the figure seems to self-identify as Muslim himself. But there is something much deeper in his statement, which was hurled in anger for a minority population already under social siege. Indeed, there is a denial that violence terrorismus–in Kant’s terms, violence that justifies itself only in terms of the descent and not the positive possibility of humanity–is itself justifiable under the terms of a religion. Yes, in this case, the speaker speaks of Islam. But again, an underlying claim made the quote resonant on social media. That claim is one that resonates with Arendt’s account of action and her critique of Pericles: that justification and action can be claimed but not claimed authoritatively or in permanency and never at the expense of another, for action is only ever action in the world of others. For the speaker, if one believed in Adonai, or G-d, or Allah, the very definition of the name denies terrorismus, the belief that human life can only decline into violence, and that one can be an agent of it. Whoever said ‘You ain’t no Muslim Bruv’ was not suggesting that the attacker did not believe in Allah; he was suggesting ‘you’re an embarrassment’, that if it were truly religiosity motivating the attack at Leytonstone, it would never have happened in the first place.”

Glenn Hendler in the LARB appreciates David Bowie’s song “Kooks.” “‘Kooks’ is written entirely in the form of a direct address. However, the addressee is a newborn infant–indeed, a very specific, personal one, the child he’d just had with his wife Angela. Then known as Zowie Bowie, and referred to next to the song’s title on the handwritten back cover of Hunky Dory as ‘Little Z,’ he has grown up to be the film director Duncan Jones. The song’s conceit is that the singer is asking whether the child is willing to ‘stay in our lovers’ story’ even though its parents are ‘a couple of kooks/hung up on romancing.’ He confesses that the child will need ‘a book of rules/on what to say to people when they pick on you/because if you stay with us you’re gonna be pretty kooky too.’ The only part I recall liking, each time it came around (skipping a song being played on vinyl did take some effort, after all) was the ‘school’s out’ bit at the end: ‘And if the homework brings you down/then we’ll throw it on the fire/and take the car downtown.’ As a child in public school in the Common Core era, who has lots of homework even in first grade, my son thinks that’s a hilarious idea…. But my point is that I heard–everyone heard–‘Kooks’ in a context that had very little to do with reproductive heteronormativity. What David and Angie Bowie projected at that moment was a radically alternative model for living. And the fact that they included in that model a song about having a baby accentuated the fact that this was a model for adult life. Plenty of rock stars produced images of perpetual youth, and especially of perpetual adolescence (including, by the 1970s already, rock stars who were no longer adolescent youths). But Bowie–in his public persona–taught that adulthood could be complicated, thrilling, unfixed. That he was sixteen years older than I was helped, of course. But so did the fact that he was self-consciously part of a younger generation than the already ‘classic rock’ stars of the 1960s. He knew exactly the demographic he was addressing when he wrote in ‘All the Young Dudes‘ from the perspective of someone whose brother was ‘back at home/ with his Beatles and his Stones/We never got it off on that revolution stuff/What a drag/Too many snags.'”

Jazz, as the modern art form that lays claim to improvisation, situates music in a productive tension between individual freedom and a mysterious yet sentient order. As do modern theories of liberalism in politics, Jazz insists both on the individual liberty of each that is through fidelity to common truths, recognition of traditional customs, or embrace of collective ends is rendered compatible with a larger inter-subjective order. Freedom as an art of improvisation means that men are free only insofar as they act in ways that are both free and constrained. This is very much what Hannah Arendt means means when she writes that “Men are free-as distinguished from their possessing the gift of freedom- as long as they act, neither before nor after; for to be free and to act are the same.” In this evening on “A Taste for Chaos: The Hidden Order in the Art of Improvisation,” we bring together leading thinkers and musicians to explore the nature of improvisation and the art of freedom.

“Learning From the West African Ebola Epidemic” is a one-day conference in New York City exploring the hypothesis that building public trust in effective organizations is essential for fighting health crises such as Ebola. The conference is grounded in the Global Health Security Agenda that seeks to accelerate progress towards a world safe from infectious disease.

About the Film: A brand new documentary about one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century. The German-Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt caused an uproar in the 1960s by coining the subversive concept of the “Banality of Evil” when referring to the trial of Adolph Eichmann, which she covered for the New Yorker magazine. Her private life was no less controversial thanks to her early love affair with the renowned German philosopher and Nazi supporter Martin Heidegger. This thought provoking and spirited documentary, with its abundance of archival materials, offers an intimate portrait of the whole of Arendt’s life, traveling to places where she lived, worked, loved, and was betrayed, as she wrote about the open wounds of modern times. Through her books, which are still widely read and the recent release of Margarethe von Trotta’s biopic Hannah Arendt (also a Zeitgeist Films release) there is renewed interest in Arendt throughout the world, especially among young people who find her insights into the nature of evil, totalitarianism, ideologies, and the perils faced by refugees, more relevant than ever. Watch the Trailer.

Wednesday, April 8, 2016

Film Forum, 209 West Houston Street West of 6th Ave., New York, NY, Time TBA

This week on the Blog, Ellen Rigby discusses how the authority of teachers lies, at least in part, in their ability to set aside judging and to present the world as it is to their students in the Quote of the Week. David Bowie reflects on how judgment and negative thinking can stifle creativity in this week’s Thoughts on Thinking. A supporter of the HAC discusses understanding and humanity as an initium in this week’s Library feature. Finally, Ian Storey reflects on the hashtag #YouAintNoMuslimBruv as a symbol of humankind’s ability to resist a kind of violence that is bound to doctrine.

“The ultimate aim was neither power nor profit. Nor was it even influence in the world in order to serve particular, tangible interests for the sake of which prestige…was needed and purposefully used. The goal was now the image itself, as is manifest in the very language of the problem-solvers, with their ‘scenarios’ and ‘audiences’ borrowed from the theater.”

— Hannah Arendt, “Lying in Politics”

It has in several countries, particularly Turkey but all across Europe, been a week of horrors. Terrorismus, a term first coined in Germany, represents the idea that humankind is always declining into a state of chaos and violence and only the righteous might rescue it. (Kant calls it one of the three basic theories of history. He rejected it, categorically, as did Hegel.) Now, the term “terrorism” has come to signify something altogether different yet obviously related: the deliberate infliction of pain, death, and fear on non-combatants for the sake of maintaining an appearance, a distinction Arendt first noted in the second section of “Lying in Politics”. Continue reading →

Hannah Arendt considered calling her magnum opus Amor Mundi: Love of the World. Instead, she settled upon The Human Condition. What is most difficult, Arendt writes, is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it. And yet she came to do just that. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection. Above all it means the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.

Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.

Adam Gopnik investigates why some pasts are more available than others: “The most persistent mistake that historians and politicians have made in analyzing the modern world is to imagine, again and again–a fallacy shared by liberals and Marxists alike–that people will pursue their own economic interests in preference to their ideological fixations. They don’t. They never will. Nationalist ideology has been a much stronger force in the modern world than class interest. This dates at least to the memorable moment when the Great War began and socialists throughout Europe were sure that transnational class-consciousness would trump nationalist war fever. It didn’t. It never has. The better question may be what divides our past so radically between the things we remember and the things we don’t. It may be that the general force of anxiety that affects everything in modern life is also responsible for the way our pasts get divided. The truth about modern life is that it creates enormous anxiety at every moment. It’s like a traumatic force that suppresses some memories and refuses to suppress others at all. Our past is divided between the archival and the available exactly because it is so quickly past–so rapidly dissolved in confusion. We all want to stop the process of traumatic change from happening, and sometimes we do it by forgetting everything, sometimes by remembering almost too much. The Beatles linger; other bands unduly fade. (Do we really need to remember ‘Mr. Moonlight’ or ‘Don’t Pass Me By?’ We do, though.) When he was running for President the first time, Barack Obama got into some trouble for saying that people in small towns that had lost manufacturing jobs ‘cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them’ as a way to explain their frustrations. It was impolitic, but, with a crucial proviso added, true: we all are clinging to something, if no more than an app at our Beatle-loving fingertips.” Gopnik is right that people cling to fantasies over and above their interests. Nationalism is at times one of those fantasies, but as Hannah Arendt points out, nationalism, while dangerous, is nevertheless limited by national boundaries. As bad as nationalism is, the real danger in the modern world is when coherent fantasies are ideological and transnational. This is part of what she means by the total domination of totalitarianism, when fantasies expand eternally with the aim of overrunning the world.–RB

Edward Mendelson praises President Obama’s college-age criticism of T.S. Eliot: “Obama sees that Eliot’s conservatism differs from that of fascist sympathizers who want to impose a new political hierarchy on real-world disorder. Eliot’s conservatism is instead a tragic, fatalistic vision of a world that cannot be reformed in the way that liberalism hopes to reform it; it is a fallen world that can never repair itself, but needs to be redeemed. Behind this insight into Eliot’s conservatism is Obama’s sense that the goal of partisan politics is not the success of one or another party or program, but the means by which private morality can be put into action in the public sphere. So the liberal Obama can respect the conservative Eliot, because both seek what are ultimately moral, not political, ends… Obama asks his friend, ‘You seem surprised at Eliot’s irreconcilable ambivalence; don’t you share this ambivalence yourself, Alex?’ Instead of isolating Eliot in some social, ethnic, or sexual category, instead of hearing in him the voice of political or ideological error, Obama finds a deep ambivalence that might be felt by anyone, just as Kermode sees Eliot’s ‘shudder’ as a special case of something felt by everyone. And instead of making an assertion to his friend about her own ambivalence, Obama asks her a rhetorical question, because no one can be certain about someone else’s inner life, though sympathy makes it possible to guess. Having first placed Eliot in his historical and literary context, then having pointed to what is unique in him, Obama ends by showing how he speaks to any individual reader who pauses to listen. This is what the finest literary criticism has always done.”

Dai George writes about the upcoming T.S. Eliot Prize and Citizen by Claudia Rankine: “The T. S. Eliot Prize carries serious money (£20,000, the most of any single poetry prize in the UK) and serious bragging rights. The list of its past winners doubles as a one-stop index of poetic celebrity on this side of the Atlantic: David Harsent, Carol Ann Duffy, Don Paterson, John Burnside, and Sinéad Morrissey take their places alongside a host of other stars in the contemporary British firmament. In recent years the prize has also acted as a lightning rod for minor controversy. David Harsent’s win last year led some observers to suggest that an oligarchy was rigging the system, dishing out prizes among its members while a growing constituency of smaller presses and their poets are effectively disenfranchised. One doesn’t have to travel too far down the road of conspiracy and recrimination to recommend the sober, factual analysis of Fiona Moore, a poet and blogger who has done valuable work crunching the numbers to prove how far British poetry prizes have to go before they can claim to represent the full breadth of an increasingly vibrant and diverse publishing ecosystem. The representation question feels particularly urgent this year since the favorite has to be Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric, a book that scrutinizes how black men and women–particularly black American men–are diminished and violated every day. It would seem a woeful category error to invite comparison between the serious, insidious brutality exposed in Citizen and this rarefied anxiety over how a book by a black woman will fare in competition for a literary prize that reflects the white cultural establishment–would seem so, were it not for the fact that Citizen confronts the white British literary establishment in its very text. In a passage titled ‘August 4, 2011 / In Memory of Mark Duggan,’ Rankine restages an encounter between her multivalent ‘you’ and ‘A man, a novelist with the face of the English sky–full of weather, always in response, constantly shifting, clouding over only to clear briefly.’ They are talking at a party in an expensive house in Hackney, the borough that erupted into violence during the 2011 London riots. The casus belli for the riots was, ostensibly, the police execution of the unarmed Duggan, and our craggy, well-meaning novelist wants to know if Rankine would ever write about this moment of specifically British racism. His question, apparently innocent and engaged, turns into one of those flare points of estrangement that Rankine captures with gut-churning precision: Why couldn’t he write about it himself? ‘How difficult is it for one body to feel the injustice wheeled at another? Are the tensions, the recognitions, the disappointments, and the failures that exploded in the riots too foreign?’ Rankine pulls off a great, and slightly risky, technical feat when she turns the novelist by degrees into first ‘the man made of English sky’ and then simply ‘the English sky.’ By conflating him with the low-key melodrama of English weather, Rankine risks demeaning the novelist as an exotic ‘other’ himself, an object defined by the clichés of his homeland. But this transition to ‘sky’ works precisely because it enacts the inverted prejudice that prejudice provokes: the blankness, the zoning out from particularities, the reflexive withdrawal that occurs when someone feels unexpectedly isolated by racial assumptions.”

Over at Esquire, they have published one of the most fascinating surveys of the year. (OK, it is only January.) “American Rage” is an exploration of how angry we are and who is angry at whom. The results are worth considering: “LET’S BEGIN WITH THE BIG REVEALS: Half of all Americans are angrier today than they were a year ago. White Americans are the angriest of all. And black Americans are more optimistic about the future of the country and the existence of the American dream. There are depths and dimensions, dark corners and subtle contours to our national mood, and setting aside the issue of who actually has a right to be angry and about what–these pages are neutral territory; everyone is allowed their beef–we found three main factors shaping American rage. EXPECTATIONS: Are you disappointed? Do you feel stifled and shortchanged and sold a bill of goods? Then you’re probably pretty angry. Consider the white men and women in our survey: From their views on the state of the American dream (dead) and America’s role in the world (not what it used to be) to how their life is working out for them (not quite what they’d had in mind), a plurality of whites tends to view life through a veil of disappointment. When we cross-tabulate these feelings with reports of daily anger (which are higher among whites than nonwhites), we see the anger of perceived disenfranchisement–a sense that the majority has become a persecuted minority, the bitterness of a promise that didn’t pan out–rather than actual hardship. (If anger were tied to hardship, we’d expect to see nonwhite Americans–who report having a harder time making ends meet than whites, per question three–reporting higher levels of anger. This is not the case.) Indeed, despite having what many would consider a more legitimate case for feeling angry, black Americans are generally less angry than whites. Though they take great issue with the way they are treated by both society in general and the police in particular, blacks are also more likely than whites to believe that the American dream is still alive; that America is still the most powerful country in the world; that race relations have improved over the past eight years; and, most important in the context of expectations, that their financial situation is better than they thought it would be when they were younger. Their optimism in the face of adversity suggests that hope, whatever its other virtues, remains a potent antidote to anger.” And one further note: “Seventy-three percent of whites say they get angry at least once a day, as compared with 56 percent of blacks and 66 percent of Hispanics. Seventy-seven percent of Republicans get angry at least once a day, as compared with 67 percent of Democrats. The least angry household-income brackets: the very rich ($150,000-plus) and the very poor ($15,000 and less). The most angry: the middle of the middle class.”

Mark Edmundson wonders at the fact that profanity seems to have the most power when children are the ones with the foul mouths: “I suspect that the swearing of kids cracks open illusions for adults. When a mom overhears her beloved child swear for the first time, her heart contracts until it feels like it will disappear. But imagine how she feels when she overhears a son or daughter who not only curses, but is truly adept at profanity–someone who summons up what Shakespeare might have been, if he decided to become practiced in the art of the headlong cursing symphony. And who knows, lover of language that he was, he may actually have created such compositions from time to time. What if mom hears her little boy, not long out of Pampers, still in shorts, reel off a euphonious string of curses that sounds like the work of a top sergeant in rage at his recruits? What’s lost then is the myth of innocence. Suddenly your child has become a kid. And what better way for the child to rebel against his period of confinement as a child than to become an adept curser? It’s not like having sex just at puberty, or holding up the neighbors with a wooden gun and scampering away with a wallet and a purse. But it really can create a gap, a true facture, between the self that was and the self that now is. The first time you hear your beloved 10-year-old say motherfucker: well, on that day something changes. Why does it disturb us so? I suppose something called parental narcissism is involved. We want the child to be perfect. We want the child to avoid all the wounds and disappointments that we suffered. We want the child to be without flaws. (For surely we had our flaws.) The child is a sort of second chance for us–a way to approach life another time and this time to get it right.”

Mensah Demary praises the New Year’s Resolution: “New Year’s resolutions attempt to correct that which has gone awry. It often doesn’t, in part because New Year’s resolutions are abandoned so often that their abandonment is woven into American culture. A local newscaster speaks over stock footage of round bellies jiggling on treadmills in gyms, and, at the end of the segment, offers a reminder that it’s okay if resolutions are forgotten, because there’s always next year, and no one achieves their resolutions anyway. Failure is assured, or implied. But while New Year’s resolutions are absurd, they are not without value. That the tradition even exists at all engenders a frame of mind necessary for personal change: Thinking about resolutions means I’m thinking about improving myself. I do need to return to the gym to remove the flab once and for all; I could also resolve to call my mother more often, or take a flight south to see her for the first time in four years; I might decide to write difficult essays that take me out of my head, my comfort zones, even if they won’t garner any immediate shares, or likes, or favorites. Expanding my reading tastes is a worthwhile resolution; I could certainly stand to read more often, which would mean less time for other things, such as Twitter, but this would be a small loss, a trifle to relinquish, since social media has become anathema to my artistic pursuits. (I would rather be known as a bad writer than a good tweeter; this is a realization that is so baffling to me, and unexpected, that I’ve been unable to do anything about it except to sit with it, turn it over, and find the lie in it, if it exists.) I could be a better sibling to my brothers and sister, as well as a better uncle to their children; I could turn to God as I deal with my mortality; I could stop wasting my money on the latest gadgets and take-out lunches, and any money saved could then be used to see more of the world with my partner. We could go to South America, or Central America, and I could peck out some words on my laptop at the beach, brushing sand away from my keyboard; I could look at the tapestries and churches, the sculptures and the jewelry, all the details my partner sees and points out; we could forget to take photos and instead resolve to remember it all, to use both of our minds to remember this one, singular trip for ourselves, and keep all of it in our heads and offline; I could finish my book, and make a note in the acknowledgements that the book was written on a trip with my partner, who reminds me of black love, of black friendship, of black power, black excellence, black family, Blackness with a capital B; I could resolve to taste more varieties of bourbon, to give gin another chance (but only one more chance), and to continue to laugh at all the wrong times, at all the wrong things; I could resolve to be even more absurd.”

Ron Srigley offers yet another condemnation of the modern university. But unlike most, he identifies what kind of universities he is writing about. “A word about which universities I have in mind, because not all universities are the same. I wish to speak about third- and fourth-tier Canadian schools that are primarily undergraduate institutions. Historically, these schools have had few graduate programs and have focused their curriculum on the liberal arts and sciences. Today they are abandoning this tradition at an alarming rate in favor of professional programs like engineering, nursing, education, and business. As they stand, these schools are about as similar to, say, the Claremont Colleges as pickled eggs are to Coquilles Saint-Jacques. They’re both universities, but … So just to be clear about my subject, I’m going to be talking about the pickled eggs.” Srigley writes in the Los Angeles Review of Books, which raises the following question: Why should we readers of the LARB care about the failure of lower-tier Canadian colleges? He answers that one, too: “But one more thing before I begin: Why should you, parents of students at Claremont or Stanford or one of the UC schools, care? What’s it to you how these universities are faring? Perhaps you shouldn’t care. But I think it might be good for you, for two reasons. First, it’s always good to think about the less fortunate. It can make you more merciful, because you see how fickle fate can be and how, social capital notwithstanding, one or two slight turns of the screw either way could have caused things to turn out quite differently. It can also build community and even create more equity because seeing others’ misfortunes tends to make us less inclined to add to them. But second, and more to the point, the disease from which my university suffers, yours does too. It’s not as bad where you are, stage one or two as opposed to stage four, but it is recognizably the same disease, and its just as aggressive: administrative bloat, student illiteracy, lots of ‘student experience’ but very little ‘student intelligence,’ dumb and dumber no longer a bad Hollywood joke but the unacknowledged consequence, if not the principle, of higher education. If you think I exaggerate, please read on. The university education you save may be your child’s.” And this is too good not to include: “During one class a couple of years ago, I dimmed the lights in order to show a clip of an interview. The moment the lights went down I saw dozens and dozens of bluish, illumined faces emerge from the darkness. That’s when I understood that a lecture or discussion is now only one of several entertainment options available to students in the university classroom. Given the way the game is played, lectures and discussions rank well below Facebook or Tumblr. You can’t get mad at them for this, not like in the old days. ‘Hey, you, pay attention! This is important.’ Say that today and you won’t hear anger or shame. You’ll hear something like: ‘Wha…? Oh, sorry sir. My bad. I didn’t mean anything.’ And they don’t. They don’t mean anything. They are not dissing you; they are not even thinking about you, so it’s not rebellion. It’s simply that the ground has shifted and left you hanging there in empty space, like Wile E. Coyote. Just a few more moments (or years) and down we’ll all tumble. These people look like students. They have arms and legs and heads. They sit in a class like students used to do; they have books and write papers and take exams. But they are not students anymore, and you are not a professor. And there’s the rub.”

Jazz, as the modern art form that lays claim to improvisation, situates music in a productive tension between individual freedom and a mysterious yet sentient order. As do modern theories of liberalism in politics, Jazz insists both on the individual liberty of each that is through fidelity to common truths, recognition of traditional customs, or embrace of collective ends is rendered compatible with a larger inter-subjective order. Freedom as an art of improvisation means that men are free only insofar as they act in ways that are both free and constrained. This is very much what Hannah Arendt means means when she writes that “Men are free-as distinguished from their possessing the gift of freedom- as long as they act, neither before nor after; for to be free and to act are the same.” In this evening on “A Taste for Chaos: The Hidden Order in the Art of Improvisation,” we bring together leading thinkers and musicians to explore the nature of improvisation and the art of freedom.

“Learning From the West African Ebola Epidemic” is a one-day conference in New York City exploring the hypothesis that building public trust in effective organizations is essential for fighting health crises such as Ebola. The conference is grounded in the Global Health Security Agenda that seeks to accelerate progress towards a world safe from infectious disease.

About the Film: A brand new documentary about one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century. The German-Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt caused an uproar in the 1960s by coining the subversive concept of the “Banality of Evil” when referring to the trial of Adolph Eichmann, which she covered for the New Yorker magazine. Her private life was no less controversial thanks to her early love affair with the renowned German philosopher and Nazi supporter Martin Heidegger. This thought provoking and spirited documentary, with its abundance of archival materials, offers an intimate portrait of the whole of Arendt’s life, traveling to places where she lived, worked, loved, and was betrayed, as she wrote about the open wounds of modern times. Through her books, which are still widely read and the recent release of Margarethe von Trotta’s biopic Hannah Arendt (also a Zeitgeist Films release) there is renewed interest in Arendt throughout the world, especially among young people who find her insights into the nature of evil, totalitarianism, ideologies, and the perils faced by refugees, more relevant than ever. Watch the Trailer.

Wednesday, April 8, 2016

Film Forum, 209 West Houston Street West of 6th Ave., New York, NY, Time TBA

This week on the Blog, Wolfgang Heuer notes how it is worth analysing the different forms of violence and asking why and how they transgress various boundaries to approach omnipotence in the Quote of the Week. Sir Joshua Reynolds comments on the lengths to which a man will go to avoid the real labor of thinking in this week’s Thoughts on Thinking. We are pleased to announce the winners of our 2015 student opinion contest. Finally, we appreciate the annotations Arendt made to her copy of Nisbet’s “Social Change and History” in this week’s Library feature.

Hannah Arendt considered calling her magnum opus Amor Mundi: Love of the World. Instead, she settled upon The Human Condition. What is most difficult, Arendt writes, is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it. And yet she came to do just that. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection. Above all it means the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.

Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.

Jonathan Rauch notes that the rule of 14–“No one gets elected president who needs longer than 14 years to get from his or her first gubernatorial or Senate victory to either the presidency or the vice presidency”–may be coming to an end. Hillary Clinton was elected to the Senate 16 years ago. Jeb Bush 18 years ago. Many of the leaders have zero political or military experience. Rauch writes: “Well, there is nothing magical about the number 14. What matters about the rule is not the exact number–14 versus (say) 12 or 16–but its reflection of an underlying public preference for presidents who are battle-tested but not battle-weary, experienced enough to know their way around but fresh enough to bring new energy to the job. That is a perfectly sensible preference–but one that appears to be declining, at least on the Republican side. A real break with the rule’s inner logic would be the election not of someone with two or four too many years of political experience, but of someone with no political experience at all. That day seems to be drawing closer. The chart below shows the experience level of presidential winners and losers from 1960 to 2012. (For the purposes of this graph, experience equals years between first election to a governorship, a Senate seat, or the vice presidency and election to the presidency; the trend lines do not change much if House experience is included.) Starting in 1996, the candidate with more experience begins consistently losing. Moreover, as the trend lines show, the inexperience premium has increased over time. That makes some sense: As voters have grown angrier with government, they have become more receptive to outsiders. Republicans, in general, are especially angry with government, so no one will be surprised to learn that since 1980 their presidential candidates have had, on average, three to four years’ less experience than the Democrats’ candidates…. Two generations ago, in 1962, the great political scientist James Q. Wilson wrote a prescient book, The Amateur Democrat, in which he pointed out that political amateurs who were unyielding in their righteousness had begun supplanting the political professionals who were willing to make deals and compromise. The ascendency of amateurism, he predicted, would cause social friction and governmental gridlock: ‘Political conflict will be intensified, social cleavages will be exaggerated, party leaders will tend to be men skilled in the rhetorical arts, and the party’s ability to produce agreement by trading issue-free resources will be reduced.’ That is a disagreeably accurate description of where we find ourselves today. It suggests why amateurism is a much better qualification for The Apprentice than for high political office. Being fresh is one thing. Half-baked is another.” The lack of experience in political leaders is now a well-worn truism. George W. Bush and Barack Obama each had singularly thin resumes for the office of President. In New York, Michael Bloomberg was a neophyte, as is Bill de Blasio. At a time when we want the next new thing for the holidays and we are easily bored if we can’t watch an entire TV show in two nights of binge watching, we want our political leaders new and fresh. Experience is out. The ingénue is in.

Karl Ove Knausgaard, who traveled to Albania to witness a kind of brain surgery that needs to be performed while the patient is awake, describes what it was like to look at a human brain. He sees a kind of visceral beauty–the article’s title calls it “terrible beauty”– in the brains he observes, extraordinarily delicate and yet responsible for all he knows. He looks into the joints and muscles of thought, all of which enable a body to move through the world: “I bent over the microscope again. The view this time was quite different. It was as if I were looking into an enormous grotto, at the bottom of which lay a pool filled with red liquid. Sometimes water came splashing in from the right, as if from a huge hose. I had never seen anything like it, for the walls of this grotto were so obviously alive, made of living tissue. Along the edges of the pool, above the red surface, the walls were ragged. Behind the innermost wall, seeming to swell out slightly, like a balloon about to burst, I glimpsed something purple. When I stepped aside to make room for Marsh again, I struggled to unite the two perspectives; it felt as if I were on two different levels of reality at the same time, as when I walked in my sleep, and dream and reality struggled for ascendancy. I had looked into a room, unlike any other, and when I lifted my gaze, that room was inside Hasanaj’s brain, who lay staring straight ahead under the drape in the larger room, filled with doctors and nurses and machines and equipment, and beyond that room there was an even larger room, warm and dusty and made of asphalt and concrete, beneath a chain of green mountains and a blue sky. All those rooms were gathered in my own brain, which looked exactly like Hasanaj’s, a wet, gleaming, walnutlike lump, composed of 100 billion brain cells so tiny and so myriad they could only be compared to the stars of a galaxy. And yet what they formed was flesh, and the processes they harbored were simple and primitive, regulated by various chemical substances and powered by electricity. How could it contain these images of the world? How could thoughts arise within this hunk of flesh?”

Michel Houellebecq’s latest novel was recently translated into English as Submission. One of the novels I read over the holidays, Submission offers a no-holds-barred attack on agnostic, academic, Enlightenment values. The reason seems to be that Houellebecq is convinced that the Enlightenment is dead and that life without religion may not really be possible. Hence the title and the main plot point that a moderate Islamic Party led by a charismatic and brilliant leader could become President of France in 2022. Houellebecq articulates some of his views in a revealing interview with Sylvain Bourmeau in the Paris Review.

“PR: I don’t see it. On the contrary, the same people are often militant antiracists and fervent defenders of secularism, with both ways of thinking rooted in the Enlightenment.
MH: Look, the Enlightenment is dead, may it rest in peace. A striking example? The left wing candidate on Olivier Besancenot’s ticket who wore the veil, there’s a contradiction for you. But only the Muslims are in an actually schizophrenic situation. On the level of what we customarily call values, Muslims have more in common with the extreme right than with the left. There is a more fundamental opposition between a Muslim and an atheist than between a Muslim and a Catholic. That seems obvious to me.
PR: But I don’t understand the connection with racism …
MH: That’s because there is none. Objectively speaking, there is none. When I was tried for racism and acquitted, a decade ago, the prosecutor remarked, correctly, that the Muslim religion was not a racial trait. This has become even more obvious today. So we have extended the domain of ‘racism’ by inventing the crime of islamophobia.
PR: The word may be badly chosen, but there do exist forms of stigma toward groups or categories of person, which are forms of racism …
MH: No, islamophobia is not a kind of racism. If anything has become obvious, it’s that.
PR: Islamophobia serves as a screen for a kind of racism that can no longer be expressed because it’s against the law.
MH: I think that’s just false. I don’t agree.
PH: You rely on another dubious dichotomy, the opposition between anti-Semitism and racism, when actually we can point to many moments in history when those two things have gone hand in hand.
MH: I think anti-Semitism has nothing to do with racism. I’ve spent time trying to understand anti-Semitism, as it happens. One’s first impulse is to connect it with racism. But what kind of racism is it when a person can’t say whether somebody is Jewish or not Jewish, because the difference can’t be seen? Racism is more elementary than that, it’s a different skin color …
PR: No, because cultural racism has been with us for a long time.
MH: But now you’re asking words to mean something they don’t. Racism is simply when you don’t like somebody because he belongs to another race, because he hasn’t got the same color skin that you do, or the same features, et cetera. You can’t stretch the word to give it some higher meaning.
PR: But since, from a biological point of view, ‘races’ don’t exist, racism is necessarily cultural.MH: But racism exists, apparently, all around us. Obviously it has existed from the moment when races first began mixing … Be honest, Sylvain! You know very well that a racist is someone who doesn’t like somebody else because he has black skin or because he has an Arab face. That’s what racism is.PR: Or because his values or his culture are …
MH: No, that’s a different problem, I’m sorry.
PR: Because he is polygamous, for example.
MH: Ah, well, one can be shocked by polygamy without being the least bit racist. That must be the case for lots of people who are not the least bit racist. But let’s go back to anti-Semitism, because we’ve gotten off topic. Seeing as how no one has ever been able to tell whether somebody is Jewish just by his appearance or even by his way of life, since by the time anti-Semitism really developed, very few Jews had a Jewish way of life, what could antisemitism really mean? It’s not a kind of racism. All you have to do is read the texts to realize that anti-Semitism is simply a conspiracy theory–there are hidden people who are responsible for all the unhappiness in the world, who are plotting against us, there’s an invader in our midst. If the world is going badly, it’s because of the Jews, because of Jewish banks … It’s a conspiracy theory.
PR: But in Soumission, isn’t there a conspiracy theory–the idea that a ‘great replacement,’ to use the words of Renaud Camus, is underway, that Muslims are seizing power?MH: I don’t know much about this ‘grand replacement’ theory, but I gather it has to do with race. Whereas in my book, there is no mention of immigration. That’s not the subject.PR: It’s not necessarily racial, it can be religious. In this case, your book describes the replacement of the Catholic religion by Islam.MH: No. My book describes the destruction of the philosophy handed down by the Enlightenment, which no longer makes sense to anyone, or to very few people. Catholicism, by contrast, is doing rather well. I would maintain that an alliance between Catholics and Muslims is possible. We’ve seen it happen before, it could happen again.PR: You who have become an agnostic, you can look on cheerfully and watch the destruction of Enlightenment philosophy?MH: Yes. It has to happen sometime and it might as well be now. In this sense, too, I am a Comtean. We are in what he calls the metaphysical stage, which began in the Middle Ages and whose whole point was to destroy the phase that preceded it. In itself, it can produce nothing, just emptiness and unhappiness. So yes, I am hostile to Enlightenment philosophy, I need to make that perfectly clear.”

For Houellebecq, there is a novelist’s delight in watching the Enlightenment implode. But it is not the delight of the nihilist, the one who avows nothing and takes joy in destruction. Perhaps even scarier to many, especially those defenders of the Enlightenment, Houellebecq welcomes what he calls a necessary return of God to politics and to life–he even welcomes Islam as a regenerator of values in Western society. He accepts this fact and all its consequences. Above all, he argues, “feminism is demographically doomed.” Submission is fearless, which makes it worth reading.

Hua Hsu considers what he calls the “imaginary college student,” the one at the heart of all the fretting about what is or is not possible to talk about at colleges and universities: “Consider the trajectory of the typical twenty-something, born in the early nineties, a product of the test-oriented No Child Left Behind educational model. This hypothetical student came of age during the Obama era, with a new understanding of America’s future demographics, at a moment when the narrative of a red and blue America was firm orthodoxy. This student’s first Presidential election may involve Donald Trump. Identity politics, in the world this student knows, are no longer solely the province of minorities who have been pushed to the margins. The same ideas about inclusivity and belonging that spark campus revolt also underlie the narratives of grievance and decline animating supporters of Trump and the Tea Party. Within this context, where large swaths of the so-called real world have already surrendered to cynicism, perhaps direct action and protests, even in the name of seemingly minor causes, are the only politics that still makes sense. It is tempting to conclude that what is happening is simply a rerun of what always happens, this time in the age of aggregation. But I’m not sure what we accomplish by insisting that nothing new is going on, or by suggesting that students simply try harder to belong. It seems similarly unhelpful to belittle an archetype, questioning the sources of their esteem or reading their motives in bad faith. The imaginary college student is a character born of someone else’s pessimism. It is an easy target, a perverse distillation of all the self-regard and self-absorption ascribed to what’s often called the millennial generation. But perhaps it goes both ways, and the reason that college stories have garnered so much attention this year is our general suspicion, within the real world, that the system no longer works. Their cries for justice sound out of step to those who can no longer imagine it. Maybe we’re troubled by these students’ attempts to imagine change on so microscopic a level. Maybe they interest us as a litmus test for the political future–one with different frontiers and more vociferous demands. There is a naïve idealism at the heart of student protest, which might be desperate or loud but never as cynical as the world that necessitated it. Today’s youth should be understood in terms of the choices available to them, not the world they’ve inherited. Let college kids be, many of us say, for they are no weirder than we were. It’s a comparison meant to be generous, since past generations, we think, turned out more or less O.K. This flatters the old, not the young.”

In an article written by Sheila Heti, the children’s musician Raffi wonders aloud whether making music for children is that different than make music for adults: “Raffi doesn’t have any grand theories about why his music has been so successful, but he credits a group called the Babysitters as early inspiration. While researching children’s albums in the mid-’70s, he noticed that ‘what I liked best as an adult listener was music that was not cloying and overly syrupy. I knew that I wanted to sing with love and respect and also be playful. You’re not going goo-goo ga-ga. Why would you? I just tuned in to my own compassion for the little boy I had been when I was very young. I think compassion guided me through the music and my career.’ This also affected his choice of songs; on his Christmas album, he decided not to include ‘Santa Claus Is Coming to Town’ because of the lyric ‘He knows if you’ve been bad or good.’ ‘I mean, it’s a cute song lyric, but it’s not okay in terms of how we ought to see children. Everybody’s good and bad. It doesn’t mean you don’t get presents at Christmas.’ Although he doesn’t sing much for adults anymore, it wouldn’t be hard to switch. He says the main difference between singing for adults and children is ‘the material, obviously. If I’m singing a love song, I treat that the way the song needs to be treated. You go with the repertoire. But I am who I am when I’m singing, that doesn’t change.'”

Jazz, as the modern art form that lays claim to improvisation, situates music in a productive tension between individual freedom and a mysterious yet sentient order. As do modern theories of liberalism in politics, Jazz insists both on the individual liberty of each that is through fidelity to common truths, recognition of traditional customs, or embrace of collective ends is rendered compatible with a larger inter-subjective order. Freedom as an art of improvisation means that men are free only insofar as they act in ways that are both free and constrained. This is very much what Hannah Arendt means means when she writes that “Men are free-as distinguished from their possessing the gift of freedom- as long as they act, neither before nor after; for to be free and to act are the same.” In this evening on “A Taste for Chaos: The Hidden Order in the Art of Improvisation,” we bring together leading thinkers and musicians to explore the nature of improvisation and the art of freedom.

“Learning From the West African Ebola Epidemic” is a one-day conference in New York City exploring the hypothesis that building public trust in effective organizations is essential for fighting health crises such as Ebola. The conference is grounded in the Global Health Security Agenda that seeks to accelerate progress towards a world safe from infectious disease.

About the Film: A brand new documentary about one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century. The German-Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt caused an uproar in the 1960s by coining the subversive concept of the “Banality of Evil” when referring to the trial of Adolph Eichmann, which she covered for the New Yorker magazine. Her private life was no less controversial thanks to her early love affair with the renowned German philosopher and Nazi supporter Martin Heidegger. This thought provoking and spirited documentary, with its abundance of archival materials, offers an intimate portrait of the whole of Arendt’s life, traveling to places where she lived, worked, loved, and was betrayed, as she wrote about the open wounds of modern times. Through her books, which are still widely read and the recent release of Margarethe von Trotta’s biopic Hannah Arendt (also a Zeitgeist Films release) there is renewed interest in Arendt throughout the world, especially among young people who find her insights into the nature of evil, totalitarianism, ideologies, and the perils faced by refugees, more relevant than ever. Watch the Trailer.

Wednesday, April 8, 2016

Film Forum, 209 West Houston Street West of 6th Ave., New York, NY, Time TBA

This holiday week on the Blog, Samantha Hill discusses how Arendt’s The Human Condition forces us to ask the question “What does it means to be at home in the world?” in the Quote of the Week. Also, Sherwood Anderson comments on the suppression of a human being’s “deep well of thinking” in this week’s Thoughts on Thinking.

“There is a difference between a man who sets out to murder his old aunt and people who without considering the economic usefulness of their actions at all (…) build factories to produce corpses. (…) Perhaps what is behind it all is only that individual human beings did not kill other individual human beings for human reasons, but that an organized attempt was made to eradicate the concept of the human being…. And all this … arises from – or, better, goes along with – the delusion of the omnipotence (not simply with the lust for power) of an individual man. If an individual man qua man were omnipotent, then there is in fact no reason why men in the plural should exist at all – just as in monotheism it is only God’s omnipotence that made him ONE.”

— Hannah Arendt / Karl Jaspers: Correspondence 1926-1969

Arendt distinguishes two historical boundaries that separated pre-modernity from modernity and liberalism from total domination. In her books The Human Condition and Between Past and Future, Arendt discusses the profound changes that modernity brought about through technological progress and world alienation, by withdrawal from the common world into self-reflection, by division of the world into subjectivity and objectivity, by substitution of philosophy and politics with an instrumental understanding of theory and praxis, and by the loss of the interwoven phenomena of authority, tradition, and religion as guarantees for the stability of political communities. Continue reading →

Hannah Arendt considered calling her magnum opus Amor Mundi: Love of the World. Instead, she settled upon The Human Condition. What is most difficult, Arendt writes, is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it. And yet she came to do just that. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection. Above all it means the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.

Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.

For the holidays, Catherine Wilkinson, aka Bosscook, offers an inspiring idea for gift-giving: “Rather than buy ourselves and our young adult children gifts this Christmas, we decided to walk the walk. You know. That walk where you stop indulging yourself with increasingly frivolous items and actually reach out to help others not as fortunate. We bought several Walmart gift cards with funds we would have used to buy our gifts for one another and our kids. Then our daughter and daughter-in-law (who is pregnant with twins, our 10th and 11th grandchildren, so yes, we have more than enough blessings in our life), Mr. Wilkinson and I went to our local Walmart yesterday, a beautiful Sunday morning. Not quite knowing how to do what we wanted to do, just praying we’d get it right and not embarrass anyone or get arrested. Our girls decided on an approach, took the gift cards, and my husband and I stood at a distance, ready to help if needed. The girls walked along and watched the check-out lines, and when they felt a tug at their kind hearts, they went up to people ready to check out and asked, ‘May I buy your groceries?‘ The initial responses were ones of shock and disbelief. No one was rude, or dismissive. They just wanted to know why. The girls answered that they were part of a family who decided this was the way they wanted to celebrate Christmas. Then a few asked if they were with a church or an organization. No, the girls said, we are just a regular family and this is our gift to you! No strings attached! From us! Then the miracles came. The first one, a young Mom, with a cart of food and just a couple of tiny presents for her little son, broke down in sobs, confiding that she ‘didn’t know how I could afford any of this’. Her hugs and her tears washed away all the nervousness our girls felt at first. They helped her bag her groceries and they all held one another for a long time, before this young woman left the store, trying hard not to sob.” There are more miracles here that will warm your heart. h/t WRM. –RB

Aziz Rana writing in n+1 takes on the American Creed, which he argues is simply inconsistent with racial equality. “The intensity of this paradox–of superficial equality amid widespread deprivation–has sustained a year of protest. It has drawn activists’ attention toward questions not of intentional bias–the Bull Connors of the 1960s, the Donald Trumps of today–but of structural racism. This turn to structure is evident everywhere. Where Ta-Nehisi Coates once presented Obama’s election as the culmination of the civil rights movement, completing the legacies of Martin and Malcolm, he now calls for reparations for slavery and presents white supremacy as constitutive of the republic. For Coates and countless others, racism is now about deep-rooted hierarchies, the living legacies of centuries of economic exploitation and state-sanctioned violence that have endured despite the end of legal discrimination. The emphasis on structure speaks to a remarkable development in American public discourse. Today, the ‘creedal’ story of national identity–according to which the United States has been committed to the principle that ‘all men are created equal’ from the time of its founding, and our history can be viewed as a steady fulfillment of this idea–finds itself in profound crisis. This story has been unmasked, not for the first time, by the problem of race. So has the vision for reform with which it is associated–the steady opening of equal opportunity to all. The creed is so central to American identity that it has become difficult to imagine an alternative, similarly grounded in a strong political tradition. Finding and defending such a tradition is the difficulty of the present moment, but also its promise.” Rana’s claim that racism demands we abandon the liberal American creed and attack the liberal structures of American society is one widely heard amidst the protests over police violence and college racism. It is, in the words of Shelby Steele in his new book Shame: How America’s Past Sins Have Polarized Our Country, part of a fundamental fallacy that sees America as an inherently evil country that was never actually a good or fair nation. Steele calls this argument “characterological evil:” namely, that the country’s past sins have made all attempts at reform futile. It is also analogous to an ad hominem argument, one against the person or nation itself absent an argument. Such characterological arguments make “anti-Americanism a precondition for the nation’s redemption from its past.”

Rana’s worry that America itself is fundamentally oppressive is, as he writes, based on the rhetorical strategy of ‘unmasking.’ Unmasking, as Peter Baehr writes in the latest issue of HA: The Journal of the Hannah Arendt Center, “refers to a mode of exposure that accuses a person, argument or way of life of being fundamentally defective. It may be claimed, for instance, that a person is an imposter.” For Rana, America has been unmasked as such a fake. It is not a country of freedom, equality, and justice but a nation built on the hypocrisies of racism, sexism, and economic oppression. Unmaskers argue that they see through illusions to a stark truth. As Baehr writes, “Unmaskers do not simply claim to see what others have missed; they claim to see through–a person or object. ‘Things are not what they seem. They reveal their true meaning only when decoded in accordance with the knowledge of the initiated–at which point they make complete sense and everything falls into place in a universal scheme.'” Baehr traces unmasking back to the terror of the French Revolution: “Traitors,” Robespierre urged, “must be unmasked and struck without pity.” What unmaskers forget, he writes, is that the word ‘person’ is from the Latin ‘persona’ which is that which sounds through a mask. To be a person is always to wear a mask, to present oneself in public as a citizen or in a chosen role. All of us are hypocrites if we lay bare the hidden vices of our hearts. To demand that we strip off our mask and appear in public as naked selves is as impossible as it is totalitarian. It is a search for authenticity that can never be achieved except by a constant ratcheting up of the charge of hypocrisy so that today’s radical unmasker is tomorrow’s unmasked hypocrite. Once the process of unmasking asserts itself, there is no place for refuge. Which is why the demand that the American Creed be unmasked leads, inevitably, to the conclusion that America itself is evil and needs to be undone. That is the logic of Rana’s argument that the American Creed has been unmasked. And it is the reason that Hannah Arendt repeatedly stated that once hypocrisy is unmasked, rage replaces virtue as the spirit of the people. –RB

The Hannah Arendt Center is now preparing our Fall 2016 conference, “How Do We Talk About Difficult Questions?: Race, Sex, and Religion on Campus.” While college is a safe space for difficult questions, free and collegiate inquiry rests on rules of civility. We raise our hands to speak, listen to those who disagree, and make sacred the space of collective inquiry. Asking difficult questions in a respectful way structures our search for truths and prepares us for the activity of democratic citizenship. The emergence of the seemingly unbridgeable divides separating republican and democratic truths, black and white truths, male and female truths, secular and religious truths is that nearly all of us are increasingly so committed to the absolute truth of our partial story of reality that we find opposing truth and opposing stories existentially threatening. At a moment when difficult questions are evacuated from public spaces, we must strive to maintain the idea of college and university life as a safe space for difficult and contested thinking. Bringing together academics, business people, artists, and intellectuals, we ask the following: how can we protect the spirit of the university while honoring our unshakable commitment to justice and equality? Talking about hard questions of race, sex, and religion takes courage today. When Arendt writes, “Courage liberates men from their worry about life for the freedom of the world,” she says that the imagination of and preservation of the common world is of greater meaning than our individual lives. And when she continues, “Courage is indispensable because in politics not life but the world is at stake,” she reiterates that all who engage in politics must strive to act in ways that elevate the glory of our common world above ourselves. One reason to keep returning to Arendt’s writing and thinking is because she so forcefully reminds us that the public world is always endangered and in need of political actors with the courage to act and speak in ways that are surprising, captivating, and unnerving. The Hannah Arendt Center is dedicated to bringing Arendt’s bold and provocative style of thinking about important political and ethical questions to a broad audience. You can read about what we do here. Please consider becoming a member and supporting our work. –RB

S. Brent Plate considers what the role of marginalia is in a digital world: “The margins are sites of engagement and disagreement: between text and reader and, to stretch it tenuously further, between author and reader. From Talmudic studies to legal amendments, margins have been the places where texts have been kept alive–alive because they’ve been read and responded to. Modern democratic society itself, which arguably would have been impossible without books and print, is based on interactions that both produce, and are produced by, a collapsing of power. This occurs not just through the mass production and consumption of literature, pamphlets, and the news of the world–making knowledge accessible to more people–but engagement with the production of knowledge. Walter Benjamin’s essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility’ exalts the rise of the Letters to the Editor section of newspapers so that ‘at any moment the reader is ready to become a writer.’ Marginalia operates in a similar matter, turning readers into writers, and upsetting the hierarchy of the author as authority. How New Media alter and resituate these power dynamics is part of what is at stake in the current debate…. What we find in marginalia is not simply a place of intellectual disputation, two minds duking it out, but a site for the body to awaken from its long sleep and dispute the mind. In reality, reading is sensual: we read with our eyes, or in the case of braille and other practices, with our fingers. But the rational page (carefully kerned and serifed typeface, fully justified blocks of text) cuts off the sensate body, channeling our mindful intentions into its rectilinear prison, making us feel we have direct communication, jacked in. The rigid text has its uses, though messy bodies need not apply.”

In an interview, author Karl Ove Knausgaard discusses the importance of objects to his thinking: “When I wrote my last novel, I discovered how much goes on outside the narrative, or just on the outskirts of the story–objects and actions that aren’t really stories but are still a part of everyday life. When I write, I’m just as concerned with creating some kind of presence as I am with narrating a story. It’s not a stylistic trait, but a longing of some kind, and it’s that presence I seek when I write and when I read. I’m not really present in the real world, obviously. I’m closed off inside myself. Ironically, the only way I can feel present, feel that I belong, is through writing, which is really about turning away from the world. In these texts I’m not directing attention to my own presence but to the presence of objects. I’ve wanted to look at everything in the same manner, whether it’s high or low, ugly, bad, good, beautiful. A beer bottle receives the same attention as the concept of love–as much space and as much care. I’m interested in the idea of looking at things without hierarchy, in the world as it is before we start categorizing it.”

Arthur C. Brooks writes in the NY Times that we are becoming a culture of victimization and that this trend matters. “So who cares if we are becoming a culture of victimhood? We all should. To begin with, victimhood makes it more and more difficult for us to resolve political and social conflicts. The culture feeds a mentality that crowds out a necessary give and take–the very concept of good-faith disagreement–turning every policy difference into a pitched battle between good (us) and evil (them). Consider a 2014 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which examined why opposing groups, including Democrats and Republicans, found compromise so difficult. The researchers concluded that there was a widespread political ‘motive attribution asymmetry,’ in which both sides attributed their own group’s aggressive behavior to love, but the opposite side’s to hatred. Today, millions of Americans believe that their side is basically benevolent while the other side is evil and out to get them. Second, victimhood culture makes for worse citizens–people who are less helpful, more entitled, and more selfish. In 2010, four social psychologists from Stanford University published an article titled ‘Victim Entitlement to Behave Selfishly’ in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. The researchers randomly assigned 104 human subjects to two groups. Members of one group were prompted to write a short essay about a time when they felt bored; the other to write about ‘a time when your life seemed unfair. Perhaps you felt wronged or slighted by someone.’ After writing the essay, the participants were interviewed and asked if they wanted to help the scholars in a simple, easy task. The results were stark. Those who wrote the essays about being wronged were 26 percent less likely to help the researchers, and were rated by the researchers as feeling 13 percent more entitled. In a separate experiment, the researchers found that members of the unfairness group were 11 percent more likely to express selfish attitudes. In a comical and telling aside, the researchers noted that the victims were more likely than the nonvictims to leave trash behind on the desks and to steal the experimenters’ pens. Does this mean that we should reject all claims that people are victims? Of course not. Some people are indeed victims in America–of crime, discrimination or deprivation. They deserve our empathy and require justice. The problem is that the line is fuzzy between fighting for victimized people and promoting a victimhood culture. Where does the former stop and the latter start? I offer two signposts for your consideration.”

Katharine Schwab cuts into the history of rock-paper-scissors: “The earliest known references to finger-flashing games are a tomb-wall painting at the Beni Hasan burial site in Middle Egypt (dated to around 2000 B.C.E.) and centuries later on a scroll from Japan. Versions of rock-paper-scissors can be found in cultures around the world, but outside of North America it remains most ubiquitous in Asia. In Japan, the game is called jan-ken or jankenpon, and uses the same rock-paper-scissors finger positions, though a variation features a tiger, a village chief, and the village chief’s mother (who beats the chief). In Indonesia, the game is earwig-man-elephant, where the earwig overcomes the elephant by crawling up his trunk and eating his brain. But whatever the interpretation, the game is pervasive, combining everyday utility with basic human psychology. People tend to think that it’s a random (and thus fair) way of making trivial decisions, but the game’s simple structure still allows for an element of strategy, making it an unlikely but fitting subject for a worldwide competition. While your best chance of winning would be to choose your moves completely at random, humans are naturally terrible at behaving randomly. Well-trained players who think of the game as a psychologically driven battle can use this fact and other influencers to increase their chances of winning. Ironically, children are actually the most difficult to play against because they’re the most random in their choices, while adults who are inclined to overthink their moves tend to be more predictable, Simmons says. More skilled players use gambits, which are pre-decided sets of three throws that help reduce the chance that you give away your next move. The Great Eight Gambits, the most common strategies employed, have names like ‘Bureaucrat’ (for three papers used in a row) and ‘Fistful o’ Dollars’ (for rock, paper, paper). ‘It’s about choice and the power of suggestion,’ Simmons says. ‘The game itself almost disappears and it becomes this rarified force of will between two competitors when they both know what they’re doing.'” Best two out of three?

On the 20th anniversary of Emmanuel Levinas’s death, the Levinas Society is making available for one week the new documentary film “Absent God – Emmanuel Levinas and Humanism of the Other.” What better way is there to spend your holiday?

Finally, The New Yorker reaches way back into its archives to find James Thurber doing his best Ernest Hemingway impression: “It was the night before Christmas. The house was very quiet. No creatures were stirring in the house. There weren’t even any mice stirring. The stockings had been hung carefully by the chimney. The children hoped that Saint Nicholas would come and fill them. The children were in their beds. Their beds were in the room next to ours. Mamma and I were in our beds. Mamma wore a kerchief. I had my cap on. I could hear the children moving. We didn’t move. We wanted the children to think we were asleep.”

About the Film: A brand new documentary about one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century. The German-Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt caused an uproar in the 1960s by coining the subversive concept of the “Banality of Evil” when referring to the trial of Adolph Eichmann, which she covered for the New Yorker magazine. Her private life was no less controversial thanks to her early love affair with the renowned German philosopher and Nazi supporter Martin Heidegger. This thought provoking and spirited documentary, with its abundance of archival materials, offers an intimate portrait of the whole of Arendt’s life, traveling to places where she lived, worked, loved, and was betrayed, as she wrote about the open wounds of modern times. Through her books, which are still widely read and the recent release of Margarethe von Trotta’s biopic Hannah Arendt (also a Zeitgeist Films release) there is renewed interest in Arendt throughout the world, especially among young people who find her insights into the nature of evil, totalitarianism, ideologies, and the perils faced by refugees, more relevant than ever. Watch the Trailer.

Wednesday, April 8, 2016

Film Forum, 209 West Houston Street West of 6th Ave., New York, NY, Time TBA

This holiday week on the Blog, Laurie Naranch explains how rage may authorize momentary violence as a legitimate, if for Arendt, antipolitical response to injustice in the Quote of the Week. Also, German philosopher Theodor W. Adorno reflects on what it means to think anymore in this week’s Thoughts on Thinking.